WMD? Oh that WMD!

At a private "intelligence summit" attended by a number of former senior administration officials, a top Pentagon official who was responsible for tracking Saddam Hussein's weapons programs before and after the 2003 liberation of Iraq, has provided the first-ever account of how Saddam Hussein "cleaned up" his weapons of mass destruction stockpiles to prevent the United States from discovering them.

"The short answer to the question of where the WMD Saddam bought from the Russians went was that they went to Syria and Lebanon," former Deputy Undersecretary of Defense John A. Shaw told an audience Saturday at a privately sponsored "Intelligence Summit" in Alexandria, Va.

"They were moved by Russian Spetsnaz (special forces) units out of uniform, that were specifically sent to Iraq to move the weaponry and eradicate any evidence of its existence," he said.

Shaw has dealt with weapons-related issues and export controls as a U.S. government official for 30 years, and was serving as deputy undersecretary of defense for international technology security when the events he described today occurred.

He called the evacuation of Saddam's WMD stockpiles "a well-orchestrated campaign using two neighboring client states with which the Russian leadership had a long time security relationship."

Shaw was initially tapped to make an inventory of Saddam's conventional weapons stockpiles, based on intelligence estimates of arms deals he had concluded with the former Soviet Union, China and France.

He estimated that Saddam had amassed 100 million tons of munitions - roughly 60 percent of the entire U.S. arsenal. "The origins of these weapons were Russian, Chinese and French in declining order of magnitude, with the Russians holding the lion's share and the Chinese just edging out the French for second place."

But as Shaw's office increasingly got involved in ongoing intelligence to identify Iraqi weapons programs before the war, he also got "a flow of information from British contacts on the ground at the Syrian border and from London" via non-U.S. government contacts.

"The intelligence included multiple sitings of truck convoys, convoys going north to the Syrian border and returning empty," he said.

Shaw worked closely with Julian Walker, a former British ambassador who had decades of experience in Iraq, and an unnamed Ukrainian-American who was directly plugged in to the head of Ukraine's intelligence service.

John Shaw later on accuses the DIA and CIA of trying to interfere with his DOD findings:

In addition to the convoys heading to Syria, Shaw said his contacts "provided information about steel drums with painted warnings that had been moved to a cellar of a hospital in Beirut."

But when Shaw passed on his information to the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) and others within the U.S. intelligence community, he was stunned by their response.

"My report on the convoys was brushed off as ‘Israeli disinformation,'" he said.

One month later, Shaw learned that the DIA general counsel complained to his own superiors that Shaw had eaten from the DIA "rice bowl." It was a Washington euphemism that meant he had commited the unpardonable sin of violating another agency's turf.

The CIA responded in even more diabolical fashion. "They trashed one of my Brits and tried to declare him persona non grata to the intelligence community,"

Whether or not Shaw's allegations are all true, there is an overall pattern in the CIA at least that suggests that politicization at the working levels has influenced Agency judgments AGAINST the Bush Administration, perhaps nudged by VP Cheney's badgering of working level intelligence analysts and the rival operation set up in DOD by Douglas Feith.

Even Paul Pillar, author of a controversial Foreign Affairs article on the Iraq War which criticizes the raison d'etre of its inception, admits in interviews with Charlie Rose and Jim Lehrer that the leaking of sensitive NSA information to the NYT has severely damaged the CIA among its allied intelligence agencies who fear sharing with the CIA may compromise their own methods and sources.

Gen. Georges Sada also claims that Saddam removed WMD from Iraq to Syria in June 2002 via an airlift once SH became convinced that GWB was going to invade Iraq.

Also, there are tapes revealed at the "intelligence summit" of SH voicing his intention to employ gas and nerve agents in Washington and other U.S. cities.

"Israeli Disinformation" may now be becoming palpable intelligence coinage for rejecting scenarios that let the Bush Administration off the hook, since the DOD neo-con shop of Feith has been implicated in passing information to AIPAC and presumably this might be a two-way street.

However, the efforts of the Democrats to employ the WMD card and other mainstream media campaigns against Bush may hit speed bumps if additional credible information about Saddam and his coterie comes to light.