Who is Ryan Mauro?

While surfing the web, a difficult task with my limited bandwidth, I stumbled upon this child prodigy who, at age 18, had already published a book, Death to America – the Unreported Battle of Iraq, and appears to have pieced together some open source intelligence that the media has been actively ignoring. He has researched a subject that I have been talking about for the duration of the Iraq war; Saddam had WMDs and now Syria has WMDs.

Let me first state that it is logically impossible, unless one was omnipotent, to prove that Saddam did not have WMD's but the burden of proof remains on us to show that he had them. Here is a quick summary of the evidence.

The evidence that Sec. of State Colin Powell took to the UN before the invasion of Iraq was the administration's most likely probability based on the available intelligence. We can now review much of the intelligence that the administration had available and there are conflicting reports and opinions. There are always conflicting reports and opinions and it is the responsibility of the analyst to weigh the sources and the responsibility of our leaders to act, or not act, on the available information. Our current administration decided to act on very probable intelligence instead of the previous administrations decision to sit on their thumbs until we had irrefutable intelligence; something that almost never occurs. One important detail was that the reported WMD labs were mobile.

My next piece of the puzzle comes from a fellow soldier who told me he watched reconnaissance footage of trucks leaving suspected WMD facilities and driving into Syria at the onset of the invasion. I also remember news reports of U.S. forces recovering one of these mobile labs. It may have been a gun but it wasn't smoking since no traces of WMDs were found in the lab.

Now, Ryan Mauro provides another piece with his interview with a former Iraqi general and friend of Saddam, Ali Ibrahim Al-Tikriti. In the interview, Al-Tikriti states:

I know Saddam's weapons are in Syria due to certain military deals that were made going as far back as the late 1980's that dealt with the event that either capitols were threatened with being overrun by an enemy nation. Not to mention I have discussed this in-depth with various contacts of mine who have confirmed what I already knew… After Saddam denied he had such weapons why would he use them or leave them readily available to be found? That would only legitimize President Bush, who he has a personal grudge against. What we are witnessing now is many who opposed the war to begin with are rallying around Saddam saying we overthrew a sovereign leader based on a lie about WMD. This is exactly what Saddam wanted and predicted.

We did find WMDs in Iraq after the invasion just not in enough quantities to satisfy the liberal media moguls who like spoon feeding us their opinions. The reports I have heard from my fellow soldiers already had me convinced but this young man's research helps to solidify the reports. I'll have to pick up a copy of this book to see the details of his arguments to see if they really do stand up to criticism, but meanwhile, is it too late to extend to him an invitation as a panelist at the MilBlog Conference?