‘The Stockpiles Were in Iraq’

In 2004, terrorism expert John Loftus granted an interview with Larry Elder concerning the media’s lack of interest in the origins of the 20 tons of chemical weapons found in Jordan that year. Loftus is a respected former Army officer and Justice Department prosecutor.

John Loftus: There’s a lot of reason to think [the source of the chemicals] might be Iraq. We captured Iraqi members of al Qaeda, who’ve been trained in Iraq, planned for the mission in Iraq, and now they’re in Jordan with nerve gas. That’s not the kind of thing you buy in a grocery store. You have to have obtained it from someplace.

Larry Elder: They couldn’t have obtained it from Syria?

Loftus: Syria does have the ability to produce certain kinds of nerve gasses, but in small quantities. The large stockpiles were known to be in Iraq. The best U.S. and allied intelligence say that in the 10 weeks before the Iraq war, Saddam’s Russian adviser told him to get rid of all the nerve gas. … So they shipped it across the border to Syria and Lebanon and buried it. … [T]here’s no doubt these guys confessed on Jordanian television that they received the training for this mission in Iraq. … And from the description, it appears this is the form of nerve gas known as VX. It’s very rare and very tough to manufacture … one of the most destructive chemical mass production weapons you can use …. They wanted to build three clouds, a mile across, of toxic gas. A whole witch’s brew of nasty chemicals that were going to go into this poison cloud, and this would have gone over shopping malls, hospitals.

Elder: You said the Russians told Saddam, “There is going to be an invasion. Get rid of your chemical and biological weapons.”

Loftus: Sure. It would only bring the United Nations down on their heads if they were shown to really have weapons of mass destruction. It’s not generally known, but the cia has found 41 different material breaches where Saddam did have a weapons of mass destruction program of various types. It was completely illegal. But no one could find the stockpiles. And the liberal press seems to be focusing on that.

Elder: It seems to me that this is a huge, huge story.

Loftus: It’s embarrassing to the [press]. They’ve staked their reputations that this stuff wasn’t there. And now all of a sudden we have al Qaeda agents from Iraq showing up with weapons of mass destruction.

Elder: David Kay [the man in charge of searching for wmd in Iraq] said, in an interim report, that there was a possibility that wmd components were shipped to Syria.

Loftus: A possibility? We had a Syrian journalist who defected to Paris in January. The guy is dying of cancer, and he said, “Look, my friends in Syrian intelligence told me exactly where the stuff is buried.” He named three sites in Syria, and the Israelis have confirmed the three sites. They know where the stuff is, but the problem is that the United States can’t just go around invading Arab countries. … We know from Israeli and defectors’ intelligence that the son of the Syrian defense minister was paid 50 million bucks to bring the stuff across the border and bury it.

—Townhall.com, May 6, 2004