I Wonder Where Syria's Chemical Weapons Came From?

From the October 29, 2003 Chicago Tribune:

WASHINGTON — The director of a top U.S. spy agency said Tuesday that he believes that material from Iraq's illicit weapons program had been transported into Syria and perhaps other countries as part of an effort by the Iraqis to disperse and destroy evidence immediately before the recent war.

The official, James Clapper Jr., a retired lieutenant general, said satellite imagery showing a heavy flow of traffic from Iraq into Syria, just before the U.S. invasion in March, led him to believe that illicit weapons material "unquestionably" had been moved out of Iraq.

"I think people below the Saddam-Hussein-and-his-sons level saw what was coming and decided the best thing to do was to destroy and disperse," Clapper, who leads the National Imagery and Mapping Agency, said at a breakfast with reporters.

He said he was providing a personal assessment. But he said "the obvious conclusion one draws" was that there "may have been people leaving the scene, fleeing Iraq, and unquestionably, I am sure, material."

UPDATE: A reader mentioned that Syria has had a chemical weapons program since the 1970s, as this web site indicates.  It is all rather curious, however, that all this stuff went to Syria, and former Iraqi Vice-Air Marshal Georges Sada's claims.