Lizard Blade
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I'd also like to note this article as to the character of Mr. Sada:
The man who served as the no. 2 official in Saddam Hussein's air force says Iraq moved weapons of mass destruction into Syria before the war by loading the weapons into civilian aircraft in which the passenger seats were removed.
The Iraqi general, Georges Sada, makes the charges in a new book, "Saddam's Secrets," released this week. He detailed the transfers in an interview yesterday with The New York Sun.
"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."
The discovery of the weapons in Syria could alter the American political debate on the Iraq war. And even the accusations that they are there could step up international pressure on the government in Damascus. That government, led by Bashar Assad, is already facing a U.N. investigation over its alleged role in the assassination of a former prime minister of Lebanon. The Bush administration has criticized Syria for its support of terrorism and its failure to cooperate with the U.N. investigation.
The State Department recently granted visas for self-proclaimed opponents of Mr. Assad to attend a "Syrian National Council" meeting in Washington scheduled for this weekend, even though the attendees include communists, Baathists, and members of the Islamist Muslim Brotherhood group to the exclusion of other, more mainstream groups.
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.
"Saddam realized, this time, the Americans are coming," Mr. Sada said. "They handed over the weapons of mass destruction to the Syrians."
Mr. Sada said that the Iraqi official responsible for transferring the weapons was a cousin of Saddam Hussein named Ali Hussein al-Majid, known as "Chemical Ali." The Syrian official responsible for receiving them was a cousin of Bashar Assad who is known variously as General Abu Ali, Abu Himma, or Zulhimawe.
Short of discovering the weapons in Syria, those seeking to validate Mr. Sada's claim independently will face difficulty. His book contains a foreword by a retired U.S. Air Force colonel, David Eberly, who was a prisoner of war in Iraq during the first Gulf War and who vouches for Mr. Sada, who once held him captive, as "an honest and honorable man."
In his visit to the Sun yesterday, Mr. Sada was accompanied by Terry Law, the president of a Tulsa, Oklahoma based Christian humanitarian organization called World Compassion. Mr. Law said he has known Mr. Sada since 2002, lived in his house in Iraq and had Mr. Sada as a guest in his home in America. "Do I believe this man? Yes," Mr. Law said. "It's been solid down the line and everything checked out."
Said Mr. Law, "This is not a publicity hound. This is a man who wants peace putting his family on the line."
Mr. Sada acknowledged that the disclosures about transfers of weapons of mass destruction are "a very delicate issue." He said he was afraid for his family. "I am sure the terrorists will not like it. The Saddamists will not like it," he said.
He thanked the American troops. "They liberated the country and the nation. It is a liberation force. They did a great job," he said. "We have been freed."
He said he had not shared his story until now with any American officials. "I kept everything secret in my heart," he said. But he is scheduled to meet next week in Washington with Senators Sessions and Inhofe, Republicans of, respectively, Alabama and Oklahoma. Both are members of the Senate Armed Services Committee.
The book also says that on the eve of the first Gulf War, Saddam was planning to use his air force to launch a chemical weapons attack on Israel.
When, during an interview with the Sun in April 2004, Vice President Cheney was asked whether he thought that Iraqi weapons of mass destruction had been moved to Syria, Mr. Cheney replied only that he had seen such reports.
An article in the Fall 2005 Middle East Quarterly reports that in an appearance on Israel's Channel 2 on December 23, 2002, Israel's prime minister, Ariel Sharon, stated, "Chemical and biological weapons which Saddam is endeavoring to conceal have been moved from Iraq to Syria." The allegation was denied by the Syrian government at the time as "completely untrue," and it attracted scant American press attention, coming as it did on the eve of the Christmas holiday.
The Syrian ruling party and Saddam Hussein had in common the ideology of Baathism, a mixture of Nazism and Marxism.
Syria is one of only eight countries that has not signed the Chemical Weapons Convention, a treaty that obligates nations not to stockpile or use chemical weapons. Syria's chemical warfare program, apart from any weapons that may have been received from Iraq, has long been the source of concern to America, Israel, and Lebanon. In March 2004, the director of Central Intelligence, George Tenet, testified before the Senate Armed Services Committee, saying, "Damascus has an active CW development and testing program that relies on foreign suppliers for key controlled chemicals suitable for producing CW."
The CIA's Iraq Survey Group acknowledged in its September 30, 2004, "Comprehensive Report," "we cannot express a firm view on the possibility that WMD elements were relocated out of Iraq prior to the war. Reports of such actions exist, but we have not yet been able to investigate this possibility thoroughly."
Mr. Sada is an unusual figure for an Iraqi general as he is a Christian and was not a member of the Baath Party. He now directs the Iraq operations of the Christian humanitarian organization, World Compassion.
I'd also like to note this article as to the character of Mr. Sada:
When Air Force Col. David Eberly was shot down over Iraq in January 1991, he found himself in the clutches of a madman.
Qusai Hussein - in every worst way his father's son - demanded that Eberly and the other captured coalition pilots be classified as criminals of war and killed outright.
Only one man stood in his way.
Iraqi Gen. Georges Sada took his life in his hands and for weeks lobbied with a lunatic to save the pilots.
"To his personal credit, he saved my life and the lives of the other Americans and the Brits and the Kuwaiti," says Eberly, the highest-ranking POW of Desert Storm, now retired and living in Williamsburg.
Sada ended up thrown in prison and "suffered greatly for his actions," Eberly says.
Sada dismisses any talk of personal suffering. An earnest and devout Christian who wears a hefty cross of nails around his neck, Sada arrived in town last week to attend the 10th annual Vision Weekend conference sponsored by Newport News-based Military Ministries, which reaches out to military men and women around the world.
Asked how he found the guts to contradict the murderous Husseins, Sada takes no credit.
"It was not the courage from me," he told me, "but it was given to me by Jesus Christ."
Born in 1940 to a "church family," Sada is a member of the indigenous Assyrians, who predate Arabs and Kurds. He grew up near a British air base and learned to love flying.
Being a minority Christian in a Muslim country has its obstacles, but not enough to keep Sada from joining the military, training as a pilot and rising to the rank of air vice marshal.
When he wouldn't join Saddam's Baath Party in 1986, he was forced to retire. Four years later, when Saddam invaded Kuwait, the first man he called back to service was Sada. For Sada, it was a deal with the devil.
"If he loves you, it's bad. If he hates you, it's bad," Sada says. The Iraqi despot was "more than crazy. He was a very dangerous man. Only God knows what he will do."
Saddam asked Sada the quickest way to end the war. The quickest way, Sada answered, would be to turn the Iraqi troops around and bring them home.
Saddam was not amused. "If you say that again," he told Sada, "your head will be separate from your body."
When Iraq began shooting down coalition pilots, Saddam put Sada in charge of them. One by one, they were blindfolded and brought to him for interrogation, intelligence agents sitting in.
"I did my best to keep the life of the pilots to best of my ability," Sada says. "I used my rank. I don't let them (mistreat them) in front of me, and Jesus knows I would be very angry about it."
That didn't stop horrendous abuse by others when Sada wasn't around, some of which Eberly recounts in his POW memoir, "Faith Beyond Belief." He and other former POWs later sued Iraq over their mistreatment and won a landmark judgment of nearly $1 billion. That judgment was overturned at the urging of the Bush administration and the former POWs appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court. On Monday, again at the urging of the Bush administration, their appeal was denied.
Only recently did Sada and Eberly meet to compare notes on when their paths actually crossed. Eberly believes Sada was the humane captor who stood out amidst the brutality.
"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."
On Jan. 24, 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.
Then last fall, Eberly got a call from Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's office saying there was an Iraqi general working with the State Department who recalled Eberly from his POW stint and the impressive way he'd conducted himself.
"He was very calm, very confident, very brave and very clever," Sada says of Eberly now, smiling over the "clever" part.
The two men spoke over the phone, then met Feb. 28 for the first time since those interrogation sessions, sharing war stories in Fredericksburg.
"It was a very rewarding experience," Eberly says. "He's a terrific individual."
Today, Sada is spokesman and adviser to the Iraqi prime minister, helping to shepherd his country toward democracy. He shrugs off recent accounts of more violence in Iraq and claims the insurgency is losing power. He's proud of the January elections, when Iraqis chose 275 representatives for their new National Assembly, 60 of them "ladies."
His former boss, interim Prime Minister Ayad Allawi, just dodged another car bomb. I ask if Sada is concerned for his own safety, and he shrugs that off, too.
"There is always a battle between the evil and the goodness," Sada says. "And we will accept that battle, whatever will be the result. Iraq is going to be a guiding candle in the dark Middle East.
"The good Iraqis and the faithful Iraqis will never forget what the American nation has done for us in liberating our country from evil dictatorship. I bow before the American mothers and fathers for their sacrifices - they lost their beloved ones, sons and daughters, in battle of freedom of Iraq.
"Freedom is a very dear thing," says the general who risked his freedom and more for two dozen strangers. "You don't get it easy."
