Sada tells Saddam's secrets

Melanie Phillips has a long post, including an interview with the Iraqi pilot who claims Saddam flew his WMD to Syria.

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On June 4 2002, a three-mile long dam collapsed in Syria, causing a disaster over 40 square miles. When Syria asked for help from Jordan and Iraq, Saddam seized his opportunity.

For him, the disaster in Syria was a gift, and there, posing as shipments of supplies and equipment sent from Iraq to aid the relief effort, were Iraq’s WMDs. Weapons and equipment were transferred both by land and by air. The only aircraft available at the time were one Boeing 747 jumbo jet and a group of Boeing 727s. But this turned out to be the perfect solution to Saddam’s problem. Who would suspect commercial airliners of carrying deadly toxins and contraband technology out of the country? So the planes were quickly reconfigured...

Eventually there were fifty-six sorties. He [Saddam] arranged for most of these shipments to be taken to Syria and handed over to ordnance specialists there who promised to hold everything for as long as necessary. Subsequently I spoke at length to a former civilian airline captain who had detailed information about those flights. At the time he held an important position at Iraqi airways, which is the commercial airline in Baghdad...

In addition to the shipments that went by air, there were also truckloads of weapons, chemicals and other supplies that were taken into Syria at that time. These weren’t government vehicles or military equipment but large cargo trucks and eighteen-wheelers made to look like ordinary commercial operators...

To keep all these transfers under wraps, the operators worked through a false company called SES.

This company played a key role in transporting equipment back and forth between Syria and Iraq, as well as in smuggling many former government officials out of Iraq prior to and immediately after the US invasion in March 2003.

When I spoke to Sada yesterday, he told me the pilots involved were now terrified for their lives. As a result, he has undertaken not to name them. This obviously makes verifying his account very difficult.

He told me that the pilots told him that they saw yellow barrels with a skull and crossbones motif being loaded onto the planes. Comical as this sounds, he says the skull and crossbones is a recognised signal of dangerous contents, and yellow signals the presence of chemicals.

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There is much more.