Update 11/29/12<c
James Clapper, Director of National Intelligence in the Obama Administration, thought so.
From the Daily Beast:
Whether or not sensitive weapons technology was moved to Syria is a hotly disputed question in the intelligence community. James Clapper, now the Director of National Intelligence and formerly the director of the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency, said in 2003 that he believed materials had been moved out of Iraq in the months before the war and cited satellite imagery.
If the Bashar al-Assad regime falls, and should the securing of the chemical and biological stockpiles of Syria be necessary, what would be the effect if some of those materials and munitions bear Iraqi markings?
Former Iraqi General Sada asserted that Saddam’s chemical stockpile was lifted, in his book “Saddam’s Secrets” and summarized by Investor’s Business Daily:
As Sada told the New York Sun, two Iraqi Airways Boeings were converted to cargo planes by removing the seats, and special Republican Guard units loaded the planes with chemical weapons materials.
There were 56 flights disguised as a relief effort after a 2002 Syrian dam collapse.
The IBD article also mentions Israeli General Yaalon’s assertions, and those of John Shaw regarding Russian assistance in the form of former KGB General Primakov:
There were also truck convoys into Syria. Sada’s comments came 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.”
Both Israeli and U.S. intelligence observed large truck convoys leaving Iraq and entering Syria in the weeks and months before Operation Iraqi Freedom, John Shaw, former deputy undersecretary of defense for international technology security, told a private conference of former weapons inspectors and intelligence experts held in Arlington, Va., in 2006.
According to Shaw, ex-Russian intelligence chief Yevgeni Primakov, a KGB general with long-standing ties to Saddam, went to Iraq in December 2002 and stayed until just before the U.S.-led invasion in March 2003.
Anticipating the invasion, his job was to supervise the removal of such weapons and erase as much evidence of Russian involvement as possible.
An interesting statement from Brian Sayers, the director of government relations for the Syria Support Group:
We believe that if the United States does not act urgently, there is a real risk of a political vacuum in Syria, including the possibility of a dispersion of chemical weapons to rogue groups such as Hezbollah.”
What of a regime such as Saddam Hussein’s in Iraq that was suspected of actively attempting to peddle such weapons?
Should these suspicions surrounding Iraq’s possible pre-invasion transfer of its remaining chemical stockpile be confirmed, the silence being heard in the media regarding them will have been deafening.
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Just in case folks still wanted to debate the existence of Syria’s stockpile, I think we might have our answer. How many carry Iraqi markings? How many, Russian?
So, with this, one with any sense could see that by Saddam not making this transfer evident it only reinforced his enemies perception he still possess the weapons.
This is not absolutely confirm-able, but makes good sense in the light of Saddams strategy in projecting strength to his enemies.
Had anyone one known he shipped them off he would be vulnerable to attacks by enemies.
Saddam confessed to FBI interrogator Piro that this charade projecting possesion was his best deterrent against Iranian and American invasion
News of the world {NOW} 