DEBKAfile Special Report November 1, 2011, 1:21 PM (GMT+02:00)
The disclosure Tuesday, Nov. 1, by the International Atomic Energy Agency – that a spinning factor built in the northeastern Syrian town of Hasaka in 2003 was in fact designed for developing nuclear weapons from enriched uranium – had a purpose: It was intended to crowd Bashar Assad into talking to the leaders of the revolt against him instead of slaughtering them. debkafile’s intelligence sources report that Syria procured the enriched uranium and equipment for the plant from Iraq when its ruler Saddam Hussein in early March 2003 when he decided to dispose of the bulk of his nuclear plant and weapons of mass destruction by spiriting them out to Syria, then his closest ally.
The IAEA sources revealed that the Syrian government worked on the secret Hasaka complex with Abdel Qader Khan, father of Pakistan’s atomic bomb, basing it on the same technology he designed for Muammar Qaddafi’s nuclear bomb project. Khan also provided Iran and North Korea with the basics for their nuclear weapons programs.
They also disclosed correspondence between Khan and a Syrian government official Muhidin Issa after Pakistan’s nuclear test in 1998 requesting scientific cooperation and asking to visit Khan’s laboratories.
debkafile sources add: The cotton spinning plant at Hasaka could have been used as a facility for uranium enrichment by centrifuges. Yet the IAEA inspectors who visited the site two years ago found no traces of nuclear activity there. Aerial photos accompanying this article show long, disused structures standing at a distance from the factory alongside water pools, which would not be used for cotton spinning.
This group of buildings, which look like ammo stores, would confirm the presence of a large military complex at the site which may well have served a secret uranium enrichment project run in parallel to the clandestine plutonium reactor which Israel demolished in 2007.
The timing of the nuclear watchdog’s revelations points to two objectives:
-
1. A broad hint that the atomic agency has more information about the Hasaka site which it is holding back for now. If it reacts to the disclosure, Damascus may give away more than it intends.
2. To squeeze Bashar Assad into bowing to the opposition’s demands for democratic reforms and a share in government. He was given to understand that further damaging disclosures about his illegal nuclear activities will be calibrated according to his continuing rejection of political dialogue and abuses. They will pave the way towards tougher sanctions.
Sunday, Oct. 31, the Syrian ruler threatened to “burn the Middle East” if the West intervened in Syria.
Monday, NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen said firmly: “NATO has no intention [to intervene] whatsoever. I can completely rule that out.”
According to the information reaching debkafile’s military and intelligence sources, this negative applies to the alliance as a body, not its individual members. Turkey for example is directly involved in supporting the Syrian revolt against the Assad regime by laying on weapons and training and allowing rebel leaders to operate cross-border command centers on its soil.
Qatar, which is not a NATO member but was closely associated with the alliance operation in Libya, is a major purveyor of arms and funding for Syria’s anti-regime fighters. In the operation against Muammar Qaddafi, the Qataris became expert in the management of revolts against Arab dictatorships and accustomed to working in close sync with NATO intelligence and military arms.
Whether or not NATO intervenes in Syria is no longer a question. It already has, in one way or another. The question is when will Assad decide that Western intervention has reached a level warranting delivery on his threat to burn the Middle East?
I’m shocked, shocked. (Where are my smelling salts when I need them?!)
Actually in November of 2002, during the run-up to the invasion, there were satellite photos (maybe on debkafile? — I forget) showing convoys of trucks, of apparent Russian manufacture, headed for the Syrian border. And I recall, some weeks later, Bill Gertz reporting in the Washington Times CONFIRMING the same thing. Shouldn’t have surprised anybody. We already knew of Saddam’s habits of “burying his favorite bones” when he’s in trouble. During the Gulf War he had similarly secreted his best aircraft to Iran for safekeeping (this, just a couple of years after the nasty, vicious, horrendously bloody, 8-yr-long, Iran-Iraq War). Why should he have suddenly broken character now?
It has been known for years that Iraq had WMD’s. The media has been covering it up. Bush was correct.
”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 book, “Saddam’s Secrets.” He detailed the transfers in an interview 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.” ” http://www.nysun.com/foreign/iraqs-wmd-secreted-in-syria-sada-says/26514/
In in interview with General George Sada he said he is amazed that no one in the USA is listening to these facts.
Right, dweller (sarcasm). I think future historians will have a more difficult time trying to decipher what actually happened in our generation, than we have trying to understand the life of the Eblaites and the language of the Etruscans. Hopefully, all our printed and computer data will have been destroyed, so their main source of info will be gleaned from pop bottles and soiled plastic diapers in garbage dumps. They’ll get more accurate data from that, than from the garbage the MSM feeds us.
No, that can’t be!
We know that Saddam DIDN’T have nuke materials or any other WMD makin’s:
The lamestream lames & their cooperative academic cohort have TOLD us so — again & again & again — for the past eight years.
Why it’s become part of the common, received wisdom that the claim of his possessing that stuff was thoroughly mistaken (if not downright malicious) — Right?
I suppose a bank of Uranium-enrichment centrifuges could be called a “spinning factory”. Assad, apparently, has a sense of humor.