It's become a Liberal "article of faith" that Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction and no intention to build them, despite all the evidence that Saddam Hussein possessed and used them many times. When the CIA didn't immediately uncover huge stockpiles of illegal weapons, critics of Iraqi liberation were able to push the false meme that Saddam never had WMDs in the first place, or secretly disposed of them long ago, or that he was "contained" by UN sanctions. With the US invasion of Iraq telegraphed for well over a year in advance, it boggles the mind that Liberals still refuse to even consider the possibility that Saddam moved or hid whatever WMD materials he had to prevent them from being discovered.

The idea that every inch of Iraq has been examined and pronounced clean is ludicrous. Reports are still coming in of storage sites that were completely ignored by the Iraq Survey Group, which concentrated heavily on previously known WMD storage sites. Simple common sense would tell anyone that a place marked on every inspector's map "WMD Storage Facility" might not be the best place to hide your WMDs. Instead, something like buried and locked concrete bunkers not marked on any map might be a more likely location. Lo and behold, several such sites were reported to the ISG... and totally ignored.

David Gaubatz, a former member of the Air Force's Office of Special Investigations, was assigned to intelligence research. He was shown four sealed underground concrete bunkers in southern Iraq with the tunnels leading to them deliberately flooded. His sources told him that the facilities had contained stockpiles of biological and chemical weapons. He filed reports with photographs, grid coordinates, and testimony from multiple sources. But the ISG never unsealed the bunkers. "We agents begged and begged for weeks and months to get ISG to respond to the sites with the proper equipment," Gaubatz told the NY Sun. Yet the ISG felt comfortable filing a final report, in effect closing the case.

Several sources have previously indicated that Saddam sent some WMDs and equipment related to chemical and biological weapons production to Syria and Lebanon in the months preceding the US invasion. In May 2003, DEBKAfile reported that "the relocation of Iraq's WMD systems took place between January 10 and March 10 and was completed just 10 days before the US-led offensive was launched against Iraq." CIA satellite imagery showed "convoys of Iraqi trucks that poured into Syria in February and March 2003."

David Kay, original head of the Iraq Survey group, reported that "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 program." Among the things left behind, Kay reported finding a "clandestine network of laboratories and safehouses," and "a prison laboratory complex... that Iraqi officials working to prepare for UN inspections were explicitly ordered not to declare to the UN." The ISG's investigation revealed "new research on BW-applicable agents, Brucella and Congo Crimean Hemorrhagic Fever (CCHF), and continuing work on ricin and aflatoxin." Charles Duelfer, who replaced David Kay as head of the ISG, wrote in his final report that, "ISG received information about movement of material out of Iraq, including the possibility that WMD was involved... these reports were sufficiently credible to merit further investigation." Senator Pat Roberts, (R-KS), chairman of the Select Committee on Intelligence, even acknowledged that "there is some concern that shipments of WMD went to Syria."

John Shaw, former Deputy Undersecretary of Defense for International Technology Security, has charged that Saddam's WMD stockpiles were moved by Russian special forces into Syria and Lebanon. According to Shaw, former Russian intelligence head Yevgeny Primakov supervised the removal operations. GRU military intelligence and Russian "spetsnaz" (special forces) troops moved Saddam's WMDs to Syria by truck beginning in December 2002.

Former Iraqi Air Force General Georges Sada has come forward to corroborate and supplement these reports. Sada stated that hundreds of tons of chemicals were smuggled into Syria as early as June 2002, under cover of humanitarian aid to flood victims. Two commercial jets, a 747 and 727, were used to move the WMDs and banned material. "They used to do two sorties a day," said Sada. "Fifty-six sorties were done between Baghdad and Damascus."

Twelve hours of unclassified tapes were recently released to the public by the Intelligence Summit, a non-profit group headed by former Federal prosecutor John Loftus. The contents of the tapes make it clear that Saddam Hussein was determined to retain as much of his WMD capability as could be hidden from the UN weapons inspectors. The job of the inspectors, however, was not to discover what was hidden, but to verify what Iraq claimed to have destroyed. In 1991, Iraq was given three months to surrender or destroy everything related to weapons of mass destruction.

According to the tapes, Iraq did seem to have an active nuclear program as late as the year 2000. Iraqi scientists were working on enriching uranium using the plasma separation method. On one tape, Dr. Thamir Ma'aman Mawdud reported to Saddam on "the production we achieved in the advanced stages at the end of the Nineties." Mawdud went on to say that "activity hasn't died in plasma because it is allowed in some of the tests which we use. Then, sir, according to what we have done in the Iraqi National Laboratory in building plasma activity, we have a very large industrial base... We have built a factory to produce plasma systems... the truth is the applied activity is present and found in the industrial sector, and not only in the Military Industrial Commission, but in the Atomic Energy Agency, under Dr. Amer [Rashid al-Ubaydi]."

So much evidence and testimony relating to Iraq's illegal weapons has come to light since the fall of Saddam, and has been ignored. More will surely surface, as the millions of documents and tapes captured during the liberation of Iraq are finally translated, and more Iraqis feel secure enough to come forward with their stories. The full story will become known in time... but will the closed minds on the Left accept any of it, or will they continue to ignore everything that contradicts their predetermined conclusion?