Well if this is all true then there is going to be some serious rewriting of the “conventional wisdom” when it comes to Saddam’s WMDs:

Saddam Hussein’s secret documents are measured by the shelf-mile and stored inside a secure but dusty facility near U.S. Central Command Headquarters in Doha, Qatar, and in several subsidiary sites. Armed guards protect the unread dossiers. Three shifts of two hundred translators each work around the clock. Perhaps 5% of these captured documents have been studied so far, but their contents are about to shatter much of the conventional wisdom concerning Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction.

The absolutists on either side of the WMD debate will be more than a bit chagrinned at the disclosures. The documents show a much more complex history than previously suspected. The “Bush lied, people died” chorus has insisted that Saddam had no WMD whatsoever after 1991 – and thus that WMD was no good reason for the war. The Neocon diehards insist that, as in Raiders of the Lost Ark, the treasure-trove is still out there somewhere, buried under the sand dunes of Iraq.[1] Each side is more than a little bit wrong about Saddam’s WMD, and each side is only a little bit right about what happened to it.

The gist of the new evidence is this: roughly one quarter of Saddam’s WMD was destroyed under UN pressure during the early to mid 1990’s. Saddam sold approximately another quarter of his weapons stockpile to his Arab neighbors during the mid to late 1990’s. The Russians insisted on removing another quarter in the last few months before the war. The last remaining WMD, the contents of Saddam’s nuclear weapons labs, were still inside Iraq on the day when the coalition forces arrived in 2003, but were stolen from under the Americans’ noses and sent to Syria. Syria is one of eight countries in the world that never signed a treaty banning WMD, and now is the storehouse for much of what remains of Saddam’s WMD Empire. This was the target of the recent Israeli air strike.

This would explain how a nuclear reactor began to rise up in Syria and needed to be taken out by Israel recently. With only 5% of Saddam’s secret documents analyzed no one knows what the real answer will be. The fact is Saddam had WMDs and was selling them off to people clearly aligned with terrorists:

In other words, is Bodansky is right (and he usually is) as late as 2002, Saddam still retained a CW production capability and then sold it to the Iranians on the eve of war.[4] The CIA has now acknowledged that they had a highly-placed spy in Saddam’s cabinet who agreed that Saddam had gotten rid of all of his production facilities, but the super spy claimed that Saddam still retained a lethal stockpile of finished chemical weapons in early 2003. The latter information, about the remaining CW stockpile, turns out to have been incorrect, but neither the CIA nor their Iraqi super spy knew it at the time.[5]

So, as of 2002 Saddam had chemical weapons and sold is production capabilty to the Iranians – and the “slam dunk” CIA were under the impression he retained a stockpile of completed CW weapons. And he did have WMDs which the Russians had pulled out before the attack – which explains a lot about Putin last minute warning to the US about terrorist attacks. And apparently Saddam restarted all of his WMD efforts late in the Clinton administration – when he booted the inspecors:

Among the newly-disclosed documents are Saddam’s actual tape recordings of the meetings of this special group for WMD.

The National Security Agency has confirmed[6] that the tapes are authentic and that the voiceprints are unquestionably those of Saddam and his elite WMD advisers. The CIA’s super-spy, excluded from this working group, apparently did not know that it even existed.

Geez, will those in denial at least take Saddam’s OWN WORD for his efforts on WMDs? Here is the bottom line:

Translating shelf miles of documents, however, may take decades. In the meantime, enough of Saddam’s secret files have been translated to illustrate one clear trend over time: through the time of Hans Blix and the run-up to the invasion, Saddam had absolutely no intention of destroying his WMD.

This information is not only going to shatter the liberal conventional wisdom about Iraq, it will totally shake up the Democratic Presidential contest. Hindsight seems to be showing us going into Iraq was the right thing for many reasons now.