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Junkie
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WMD's Moved to Syria
We all have probably heard about General Sada by now. He was the #2 man in the Iraqi Air Force, claims that he personally witnessed WMD's loaded onto planes that flew to Syria.
Here's some background information I dug up.
Quote:
This from Air Force Colonel David Eberly, shot down near Al Quim, Iraq, 1/22/91 and liberated 3/5/91 (42 days in captivity):
At the time we first met, we were enemies. He was clearly the enemy," Eberly told me. "He was the other side of the blindfold, like anyone else who had put a gun to my head or spit on me or any other level of mistreatment.
"And yet in his mind, he personally viewed us differently. He viewed us as pilots who had protection under the Geneva Convention. He is a big man in the sense that he recognized what Iraq had signed up to, and it nearly cost him his life in trying to uphold that signature."
And what, exactly, happened to prompt these comments from Col. Eberly?
On Jan. 24, (2001) Qusai first ordered the POWs executed. When Sada balked, Qusai accused him of disobeying the orders of the president.
Sada tried to reason with Qusai, reminding him that even the prophet Muhammad once said that if prisoners of war learned 10 verses of the Koran, they could be set free. This only angered Qusai, who threatened to put the POWs in areas being bombed by American forces. Sada urged him not to use them as human shields. He kept turning to the Geneva Convention, which made Qusai angrier still.
"This was the end," Sada thought. "And I knew something was going to happen to me."
He was right. Qusai pitched him into a cell in the same prison as the POWs, and Sada wondered if his head would be separated from his body at last. But even locked up, Sada still had his contacts check on the POW pilots, making sure they were still alive.
After 12 days, Sada finally found a way to reach Qusai: He made the war personal.
"If you kill the pilots," Sada told him, "you will have new war between America and your family. They'll come and kill your father, your brother...." He ticked off Hussein family members.
"After that," Sada says, "he was changed. He thought twice."
Finally, Sada was released from prison. A few weeks later, the war ended and Eberly and the other POWs were released. Battered physically and mentally, they returned home in early March.
And Sada says this of Col. Eberly:
"He was very calm, very confident, very brave and very clever," Sada says of Eberly now, smiling over the "clever" part.
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So he is a very honorable man, protected the life of an American pilot from execution with the risk of his own.
Quote:
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."
Mr. Sada's comments come just more than a month after Israel's top general during Operation Iraqi Freedom, Moshe Yaalon, told the Sun that Saddam "transferred the chemical agents from Iraq to Syria."
Democrats have made the absence of stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq a theme in their criticism of the Bush administration's decision to go to war in 2003. And President Bush himself has conceded much of the point; in a televised prime-time address to Americans last month, he said, "It is true that many nations believed that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction. But much of the intelligence turned out to be wrong."
Said Mr. Bush, "We did not find those weapons."
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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.
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Being that high up he is clearly a credible source. It would not be difficult to mount up WMD's into cargo planes under the guise of relief support, as a simple hanger could defeat even the best satillites and aircrafter out there.
If this is true what does everyone suggest we do? Doing nothing would simply mean that Syria could just hand it off to Hamas or Al Quaeda. True their ideologies could hardly match, but their common enemy can easily override that. A full invasion is completely feasable, but our only ally in that would be Israel and Lebanon, and the former we dont exactly want their help. |