Reply #27: This could all be an elaborate disinfo campaign intended to tarnish Syria and rehabilitate neocons

[leveymg]

One should be very skeptical of these claims that Saddam was really developing WMD and somehow shipped it all to Syria or Iran, or whatever country the goon squad wants to regime change next. I call BS on this.

Even NTI, which is at the extreme end of hawkish credibility, concludes: "These reports remain uncorroborated; in the absence of any definite information claims, reports that Syria has weaponized smallpox should be treated as purely hypothetical." See, http://www.nti.org/e_research/profiles/Syria/Biological/3353.html

Sounds like Dekker's a second-string Judy Miller or Laurie Mylroie clone who's found a right-wing British tabloid willing to give her a platform. Re: Mylroie, see: http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,2763,1254072,00.html

Did one woman's obsession take America to war?


She is a conspiracy theorist whose political conceits have consistently been proved wrong. So why were Bush and his aides so keen to swallow Laurie Mylroie's theories on Saddam and terrorism? By Peter Bergen

Monday July 5, 2004
The Guardian


Americans supported the war in Iraq not because Saddam Hussein was an evil dictator - they knew that - but because President Bush made the case that Saddam might hand weapons of mass destruction to his terrorist allies to wreak havoc on the United States. In the absence of any evidence for that theory, it's fair to ask: where did the administration's conviction come from? It was at the American Enterprise Institute - a conservative Washington DC thinktank - that the idea took shape that overthrowing Saddam should be a goal. Among those associated with AEI is Richard Perle, a key architect of the president's get-tough-on-Iraq policy, and Paul Wolfowitz, now the number-two official at the Pentagon. But none of the thinkers at AEI was in any real way an expert on Iraq. For that they relied on someone you probably have never heard of: a woman named Laurie Mylroie.
Mylroie has credentials as an expert on the Middle East, national security and, above all, Iraq, having held faculty positions at Harvard and the US Naval War College. During the 1980s she was an apologist for Saddam's regime, but became anti-Saddam around the time of his invasion of Kuwait in 1990. In the run-up to that Gulf war, with New York Times reporter Judith Miller, Mylroie wrote Saddam Hussein and the Crisis in the Gulf, a well-reviewed bestseller.

SNIP