>>
>>Artifacts have remained hidden for thousands of years - only to be found by chance. And those things weren't being hidden. These things are. I still say they are either still there and hidden, or have been removed to another country like Syria.
>
>I suppose those things are possible.
>But then how to explain the U.S.'s own search of more than 12 months that looked for **any** kind of evidence whatsoever that programs to make such weapons also existed in more recent times CAME UP DRY?
>It's one thing to "hide" or transfer actual WMDs but another thing entirely to hide the evidence of their making.


Do you think it would be that hard to hide a fleet of semi trucks in an area the size of Texas? I do. The thing that I keep going back to is his history. As a friend has said to me many times, "the past is the best predictor of the future." If that is true, and I believe it is, he had to be working to amass WMDs and may have had some. I think he had them and they were moved to Syria.

Here's an excerpt from one of the Addendum reports to the CIA on WMDs at

http://www.cia.gov/cia/reports/iraq_wmd_2004/addenda.pdf

There was evidence
of a discussion of possible WMD collaboration initi-ated
by a Syrian security offi cer, and ISG received
information about movement of material out of Iraq,
including the possibility that WMD was involved. In
the judgment of the working group, these reports were
suffi ciently credible to merit further investigation.

Based on the evidence available at present, ISG
judged that it was unlikely that an offi cial transfer of
WMD material from Iraq to Syria took place. How-ever,
ISG was unable to rule out unoffi cial movement
of limited WMD-related materials.

The Ash Shaykili storage site located near the
Tuwaitha Nuclear Research Center contained
(prior to OIF) a variety of equipment and materials
associated with Iraq’s pre-1991 nuclear weapons
program. While judged insufficient to reconstitute
a nuclear weapons program, some of these items
could be exploited to obtain information of poten-tial
use to a proliferant.

Here is a good article by Jed Babbin in American Spectator that sheds more light on this subject:

http://www.spectator.org/dsp_article.asp?art_id=8296

Here's another excerpt from an article that sheds some more light on this subject:

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1151984/posts

The United Nations has determined that Saddam Hussein shipped weapons of mass destruction components as well as medium-range ballistic missiles before, during and after the U.S.-led war against Iraq in 2003.

The UN Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission briefed the Security Council on new findings that could help trace the whereabouts of Saddam's missile and WMD program.


The briefing contained satellite photographs that demonstrated the speed with which Saddam dismantled his missile and WMD sites before and during the war. Council members were shown photographs of a ballistic missile site outside Baghdad in May 2003, and then saw a satellite image of the same location in February 2004, in which facilities had disappeared.