A firm from Syria, headed by a cousin of that country’s leader, Bashar Assad, signed contracts to supply millions of dollars in arms and equipment to Iraq before the United States invaded in March, The Los Angeles Times reported on Tuesday.

In the first of a two-part series written from Damascus, The Times reported that “1,000 heavy machine guns and up to 20 million bullets for assault rifles,” supplied by SES International Corp., “helped Baghdad’s ill-equipped army grow stronger before the war began in March. Some supplies may now be aiding the insurgency against the U.S.-led occupation.”

Files cited by the Times were taken from the abandoned office of Al Bashair Trading Co., by a reporter for the German magazine Stern shortly after U.S. troops entered Baghdad.

Syrian President Bashar Assad tampered with the transcript of a lengthy interview he conducted with the New York Times, presenting a condensed Arabic version to his citizens while the full version, in English, was published abroad.
Questions and answers regarding Syria's domestic situation, Iraq, Hezbollah, normalization with Israel and U.S.-Syrian security cooperation were omitted from the Nov. 30 interview, noted Syrian journalist Subhi Hadidi, writing on Al-Rai, the website of the Syrian Communist party.
Hadidi said the English version had 11,280 words while the official Syrian press published only 5,500 words yet called it the "full version."

In another omitted section, Assad denied his nation suppresses speech.
Question: There is a period where dialogue was open, people were going to forums and there were discussions. It has all stopped. Why is that?
Assad: No, nothing has stopped. You can go to Al-Atasi Institute and we have many others.
Question: Just two months ago, they tried to have one in Aleppo and the men were arrested when they showed up.'
Al-Assad: That had to do with speaking about certain ethnicity. They didn't criticize the government; they talked about the rights of the Kurds. The Kurds are Syrians, so what rights of the Kurds? It is something related to the national unity if you talk about ethnicities. We have Chechens, Armenians and you are not allowed in the law of Syria to talk about this. This is our law. I don't know them, but they make demonstrations for things related to this issue, which is not allowed in our law. It is not related to the regime.

Hadidi said it is clear why the Syrian media did not publish this section.
"There is no Al-Atasi Institute; the only thing there is is a club," he wrote. "The Aleppo residents were not demonstrating but came to a political symposium whose topic was not Kurds' rights. But even if they had been [demonstrating] – what's the crime?"

The official Syrian news agency also censored a section in which Assad was pressed about corruption "around" him, in his circle of power.
The president responded: "Why around me? What do you mean?"
In response, the interviewer brought up a scandal involving Assad's cousin's entanglement in a mobile phone business deal, and said, "The list is long."
Assad replied: "He is a Syrian like all Syrians, whether he is my cousin, my brother, my friend, or anyone else. There is Syrian law."
Hadidi noted, however, a man who exposed the corrupt business deal, Riyadh Seif, has been imprisoned, ostensibly on tax evasion charges.
As WorldNetDaily reported, a relative of the president, Assef al-Shaleesh, runs Al Bashair Trading Co., a front for the Assad family involved prior to the Iraq war in oil and arms smuggling. Al-Bashair has offices in Damascus, Beirut and Baghdad.
Al-Shaleesh's uncle, Zu Alhema al-Shaleesh, is reported to have hidden Iraqi weapons of mass destruction in three locations in Syria.

Originally posted by Agent 47
A firm from Syria, headed by a cousin of that country’s leader, Bashar Assad, signed contracts to supply millions of dollars in arms and equipment to Iraq before the United States invaded in March, The Los Angeles Times reported on Tuesday.

In the first of a two-part series written from Damascus, The Times reported that “1,000 heavy machine guns and up to 20 million bullets for assault rifles,” supplied by SES International Corp., “helped Baghdad’s ill-equipped army grow stronger before the war began in March. Some supplies may now be aiding the insurgency against the U.S.-led occupation.”

Al-Shaleesh's uncle, Zu Alhema al-Shaleesh, is reported to have hidden Iraqi weapons of mass destruction in three locations in Syria.

In an exclusive interview Monday with the London Telegraph, Assad came closer than ever before to admitting his country possessed stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction.

Bashar Assad is hiding Iraqi weapons of mass destruction in three locations in Syria, according to intelligence sources cited by an exiled opposition party.

The weapons were smuggled in large wooden crates and barrels by Zu Alhema al-Shaleesh, known for moving arms into Iraq in violation of U.N. resolutions and for sending recruits to fight coalition forces, said the U.S.-based Reform Party of Syria.
One weapons-cache location identified by the sources is a mountain tunnel near the village of al-Baidah in northwest Syria, the report said. The tunnel is known to house a branch of the Assad regime's national security apparatus.

Two other arms supplies are reported to be in west-central Syria. One is hidden at a factory operated by the Syrian Air Force, near the village of Tal Snan, between the cities of Hama and Salmiyeh. The third location is tunnels beneath the small town of Shinshar, which belongs to the 661 battalion of the Syrian Air Force.



Assad told the London paper Syria rejects American and British demands for concessions on weapons of mass destruction, insisting Damascus is entitled to defend itself by acquiring its own chemical and biological deterrent.

Whatever, I'm right, you're wrong. Try to justify it whichever way you want to, the bottom line is you're mistaken.