A former senior military advisor to Saddam Hussein is warning that the chemical weapons used by top Al Qaida terrorist Abu Musab al Zarqawi in a foiled 2004 plot to attack Amman, Jordan were the same weapons Saddam Hussein transported to Syria before the U.S. invasion.
Gen. Georges Sada offered the stunning revelation Saturday while explaining why he didn't decide to go public about Saddam's hidden WMD stockpile until recently.
"As a general, you see, we should keep our secrets," Gen. Sada told WABC Radio's Monica Crowley. But when news broke of the foiled WMD attack on Amman, he changed his mind.
"I understood that the terrorists were going to make an explosion in Amman in Jordan . . . . and they were targeting the prime minister of Jordan, the intelligence [headquarters] of Jordan, and maybe the American embassy in Jordan - and they were going to use the same chemical weapons which we had in Iraq," he told WABC.
"It was a major, major operation. It would have decapitated the government," said Jordan's King Abdullah at the time, in an interview about the Zarqawi plot with the San Francisco Chronicle.
Had it succeeded, the WMD strike would have been the most deadly terrorist attack in world history, with Jordanian officials estimating that Zarqawi's al Qaida team could have killed up to 20,000 people.
While King Abdullah said that trucks containing chemical weapons had come from Syria, he did not identify Iraq as the ultimate source of Zarqawi's WMDs.
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