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‘I found Saddam’s WMD bunkers’

Wednesday, 18th April 2007

Melanie Phillips talks to Dave Gaubatz, a former US Air Force special agent, who passed on vital intelligence to the Iraq Survey Group — and is dismayed that nothing happened

Mr Gaubatz verbally told the Iraq Study Group (ISG) of his findings, and asked them to come with heavy equipment to breach the concrete of the bunkers and uncover their sealed contents. But to his consternation, the ISG told him they didn’t have the manpower or equipment to do it and that it would be ‘unsafe’ to try.

‘The problem was that the ISG were concentrating their efforts in looking for WMD in northern Iraq and this was in the south,’ says Mr Gaubatz. ‘They were just swept up by reports of WMD in so many different locations. But we told them that if they

didn’t excavate these sites, others would.’

That, he says, is precisely what happened. He subsequently learnt 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. The worst-case scenario has now come about. Saddam’s nuclear, biological and chemical material is in the hands of a rogue terrorist state — and one with close links to Iran.

When Mr Gaubatz returned to the US, he tried to bring all this to light. Two congressmen, Peter Hoekstra, chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, and Curt Weldon, were keen to follow up his account. To his horror, however, when they tried to access his classified intelligence reports, they were told that all 60 of them — which, in the routine way, he had sent in 2003 to the computer clearing-house at a US airbase in Saudi Arabia — had mysteriously gone missing. These written reports had never even been seen by the ISG.

One theory is that they were inadvertently destroyed when the computer’s database was accidentally erased in the subsequent US evacuation of the airbase. Mr Gaubatz, however, suspects dirty work at the crossroads. It is unlikely, he says, that no copies were made of his intelligence. And he says that all attempts by Messrs Hoekstra and Weldon to extract information from the Defence Department and CIA have been relentlessly stonewalled.

In 2005, the CIA held a belated inquiry into the disappearance of this intelligence. Only then did its agents visit the sites — to report that they had indeed been looted.

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Steg Stegsson

March 7th, 2008 6:04pm

I've printed this article out, it's been a great help to me. Every time I bump into a Melanie Philips rant, I just re-read this piece and realise objective research is not Philips' strong point.

DaveK

May 1st, 2008 10:00pm

LOL, you're dead right there. These are the rantings of an obsessive compulsive and she's just swallowed the lot whole. Without a hint of corroborating evidence. Just because someone has worked for military intelligence doesn't mean they aren't a liar - in fact, it means they quite specifically are and have been paid and rewarded for being one for many years.
Gaubatz, incidentally, is currently seeking to raise money for some daft crusade or other.
There's more reason to believe there were fairies and loch ness monsters in Iraq than WMDs.


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