The director of a Pentagon agency that analyzes imagery from satellites and spy planes said Tuesday Iraqi leaders may have moved weapons of mass destruction "material" into neighboring Syria before the war.Retired Lieutenant General James Clapper said senior Iraqi leaders made an intensive effort to bury, hide and disperse equipment, documents and other material related to their weapons of mass destruction programs in the months before the war, moving some of it out of the country.
"I think personally that the senior leadership saw what was coming and I think they went to some extraordinary lengths to dispose of the evidence," he said, director of the National Imagery and Mapping Agency. "I'll call it an educated hunch."
He noted there was an "uptick" in truck traffic from Iraq into Syria before the onset of combat and even as the war was raging.
Clapper, a former director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, acknowledged that there were limits to what overhead surveillance can detect inside trucks.
"But certainly, inferentially, the obvious conclusion one draws is that the certain uptick in traffic ... may have been people leaving the scene, fleeing Iraq, and unquestionably, I am sure, material," he said.
Clapper's agency is responsible, among other things, for interpreting imagery collected by US spy satellites and planes.
The United States has so far failed to find any weapons of mass destruction in Iraq despite pre-war US intelligence assessments asserting that it had chemical and biological weapons.
"Based on the evidence we had at the time, I thought the conclusions we reached about the presence of at least a latent WMD program was accurate and balanced," he said.
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