[Spectator-UK] Melanie Phillips - Dave Gaubatz says Saddam's WMD did exist. He found the sites where he is certain they were stored. Having served for 12 years as an agent in the U.S. Air Force's Office of Special Investigations, Gaubatz, a trained Arabic speaker, was posted in 2003 in Nasariyah in Iraq. His mission was to locate suspect WMD sites, discover threats against U.S. forces in the area and find Saddam loyalists, and then send such intelligence to the Iraq Survey Group and other agencies. Between March and July 2003, he was taken to four sites in southern Iraq - two within Nasariyah - which, he was told by numerous Iraqi sources, contained biological and chemical weapons, material for a nuclear program, and UN-proscribed missiles. He was in no doubt that this was true because of the massive size of these sites and the extreme lengths to which the Iraqis had gone to conceal them. Three of them were massive bunkers buried 20 to 30 feet beneath the Euphrates, with walls made of reinforced concrete five feet thick. There were "signs of chemical activity - gas masks, decontamination kits, atropine needles. The Iraqis and my team had no doubt at all that WMDs were hidden there," said Gaubatz. In addition, the medical records of Gaubatz and his team showed that at these sites they had been exposed to high levels of radiation. Gaubatz subsequently learned from Iraqi, CIA and British intelligence that the WMD buried in the four sites were excavated by Iraqis and Syrians, with help from the Russians, and moved to Syria. The location in Syria of this material, he says, is also known to these intelligence agencies.
2007-04-23 01:00:00Full ArticleBACK Visit the Daily Alert Archive