From American Spectator, “I found Saddam’s Bunkers”:

“It‚Äôs a fair bet that you have never heard of a guy called Dave Gaubatz. It‚Äôs also a fair bet that you think the hunt for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq has found absolutely nothing, nada, zilch; and that therefore there never were any WMD programmes in Saddam‚Äôs Iraq to justify the war ostensibly waged to protect the world from Saddam‚Äôs use of nuclear, biological or chemical weapons.

Dave Gaubatz, however, says that you could not be more wrong. Saddam’s WMD did exist. He should know, because he found the sites where he is certain they were stored. And the reason you don’t know about this is that the American administration failed to act on his information, ‘lost’ his classified reports and is now doing everything it can to prevent disclosure of the terrible fact that, through its own incompetence, it allowed Saddam’s WMD to end up in the hands of the very terrorist states against whom it is so controversially at war.

You may be tempted to dismiss this as yet another dodgy claim from a warmongering lackey of the world Zionist neocon conspiracy giving credence to yet another crank pushing US propaganda. If so, perhaps you might pause before throwing this article at the cat. Mr Gaubatz is not some marginal figure. He’s pretty well as near to the horse’s mouth as you can get.

Having served for 12 years as an agent in the US Air Force’s Office of Special Investigations, Mr Gaubatz, a trained Arabic speaker, was hand-picked for postings in 2003, first in Saudi Arabia and then in Nasariyah in Iraq. His mission was to locate suspect WMD sites, discover threats against US forces in the area and find Saddam loyalists, and then send such intelligence to the Iraq Survey Group and other agencies.

Between March and July 2003, he says, he was taken to four sites in southern Iraq ‚Äî two within Nasariyah, one 20 miles south and one near Basra ‚Äî which, he was told by numerous Iraqi sources, contained biological and chemical weapons, material for a nuclear programme and UN-proscribed missiles. He was, he says, in no doubt whatever that this was true.”

I wrote about Gaubatz last year just after this story in Front Page Magazine printed. Dave is legit and one of the best at what he does. He is rightly infuriated because the information in his reports showed that warning an enemy beforehand - such as Senator Rockefeller who spread the word in 2002 - gave Saddam plenty of time to shift weapons out of Iraq and into Syria.

Yet after five years the half truth that Saddam didn’t have WMD (yeah, not after he got rid of them), has become ‘gospel’, so as solid as Dave’s testimony is we need proof. He is correct that the IC community knows the whereabouts, but again, logistics.

That would mean that we would have to obtain the proof out of Syria, possibly by “detaining” a top level Syrian or two, or better yet send in teams that could bring back conclusive proof.

More than just “proving the point”, finding out whether or not Syria aided and abetted Iraq (a forgone conclusion but again - proof) would give us a hugh barganning chip in keeping them out of Iranian and Iraqi affairs.