Jordan's King Abdullah revealed on Saturday that vehicles reportedly containing chemical weapons and poison gas that were part of a deadly al Qaeda bomb plot came from Syria, the country named by U.S. weapons inspector David Kay last year as a likely repository for Iraq's weapons of mass destruction.
"It was a major, major operation. It would have decapitated the government," King Abdullah told the San Francisco Chronicle. Jordanian officials estimated that the death count could have been as high as 20,000 - seven times greater than the Sept. 11 attacks.
Abdullah said that trucks containing 17.5 tons of explosives had come from Syria, though he took pains not to implicate Syrian President Bashir Assad in the al Qaeda plot, saying, "I'm completely confident that Bashir did not know about it."
In his testimony before Congress last year, Mr. Kay said U.S. satellite surveillance showed substantial vehicular traffic going from Iraq to Syria just prior to the U.S.attack on March 19, 2003 attack.
While Kay said investigators couldn't be sure the cargo contained weapons of mass destruction, one of his top advisors described the evidence as "unquestionable."
"People below the Saddam-Hussein-and-his-sons level saw what was coming and decided the best thing to do was to destroy and disperse," said James Clapper, in comments reported by the New York Times on Oct. 29. Clapper heads up the National Imagery and Mapping Agency.
Israeli intelligence has long believed that after the U.S. delayed invasion plans to allow U.N. weapons inspectors time to search for Iraq's WMDs, Saddam moved the banned weapons to Syria, the only other country where the Ba'ath Party ruled.
Read the rest here:
http://www.newsmax.com/archives/ic/2004/4/17/141224.shtml
"It was a major, major operation. It would have decapitated the government," King Abdullah told the San Francisco Chronicle. Jordanian officials estimated that the death count could have been as high as 20,000 - seven times greater than the Sept. 11 attacks.
Abdullah said that trucks containing 17.5 tons of explosives had come from Syria, though he took pains not to implicate Syrian President Bashir Assad in the al Qaeda plot, saying, "I'm completely confident that Bashir did not know about it."
In his testimony before Congress last year, Mr. Kay said U.S. satellite surveillance showed substantial vehicular traffic going from Iraq to Syria just prior to the U.S.attack on March 19, 2003 attack.
While Kay said investigators couldn't be sure the cargo contained weapons of mass destruction, one of his top advisors described the evidence as "unquestionable."
"People below the Saddam-Hussein-and-his-sons level saw what was coming and decided the best thing to do was to destroy and disperse," said James Clapper, in comments reported by the New York Times on Oct. 29. Clapper heads up the National Imagery and Mapping Agency.
Israeli intelligence has long believed that after the U.S. delayed invasion plans to allow U.N. weapons inspectors time to search for Iraq's WMDs, Saddam moved the banned weapons to Syria, the only other country where the Ba'ath Party ruled.
Read the rest here:
http://www.newsmax.com/archives/ic/2004/4/17/141224.shtml
:
