Foiled al-Qaida Attackers Caught Red-Handed With WMDs

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For more articles click on the following links: King Abdullah: Al-Qaida WMDs Came From Syria Saddam's WMD Have Been Found Chemical munitions found by Polish soldiers were being pursued by terrorists Enriched Uranium Removed From Iraq

Reprinted from NewsMax.com

Saturday, April 17, 2004 11:23 a.m. EDT

Two members of an al-Qaida cell connected to top terror master Abu Musab al-Zarqawi have been caught in Jordan with chemical weapons and poisonous gas for a planned attack that Jordanian officials say would have killed up to 20,000 people.

The officials told the London-based newspaper al-Hayat on Friday that the al-Qaida plotters planned to launch a WMD attack against a Jordanian Military Intelligence installation, the U.S. Embassy in Amman and a government building in the country.

According to the Israeli newspaper Maariv, the al-Qaida terrorists managed to smuggle three cars packed with explosives into Amman. Jordanian security forces found a chemical charge in one vehicle.

"The bomb, had it been detonated, could have affected people in a one-kilometer radius and cause the deaths of up to 20,000 people," Jordanian officials told Maariv.

According to United Press International, the al-Qaida car was intercepted just 75 miles from the Syrian border and "carried explosives, a chemical bomb and poisonous gas."

The discovery of the al-Qaida WMD plot is sure to renew speculation that some of Saddam Hussein's missing weapons of mass destruction were hidden in Syria before the U.S. attacked in March 2003, and have now found their way into al-Qaida's hands.

As of Saturday morning, the White House had not commented on the al-Qaida WMD plot and its possible ties to Iraq.

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King Abdullah: Al-Qaida WMDs Came From Syria

Reprinted from NewsMax.com

Saturday, April 17, 2004 2:10 p.m. EDT

Jordan's King Abdullah revealed on Saturday that vehicles reportedly containing chemical weapons and poison gas that were part of a deadly al-Qaida bomb plot came from Syria, the country named by U.S. weapons inspector David Kay last year as a likely repository for Iraq's weapons of mass destruction.

"It was a major, major operation. It would have decapitated the government," King Abdullah told the San Francisco Chronicle. Jordanian officials estimated that the death count could have been as high as 20,000 - seven times greater than the Sept. 11 attacks.

King Abdullah said that trucks containing 17.5 tons of explosives had come from Syria, though he took pains not to implicate Syrian President Bashir Assad in the al-Qaida plot, saying, "I'm completely confident that Bashir did not know about it."

In his testimony before Congress last year, weapons inspector Kay said U.S. satellite surveillance showed substantial vehicular traffic going from Iraq to Syria just prior to the U.S. attack on March 19, 2003.

While Kay said investigators couldn't be sure the cargo contained weapons of mass destruction, one of his top advisers described the evidence as "unquestionable."

"People below the Saddam-Hussein-and-his-sons level saw what was coming and decided the best thing to do was to destroy and disperse," said James Clapper in comments reported by the New York Times on Oct. 29. Clapper heads the National Imagery and Mapping Agency.

Israeli intelligence has long believed that after the U.S. delayed invasion plans to allow U.N. weapons inspectors time to search for Iraq's WMDs, Saddam moved the banned weapons to Syria, the only other country ruled by the Ba'ath Party.

On April 1, Jordanian officials announced the arrest of several terrorist suspects, saying they were still hunting for two cars filled with explosives.

Five days later, the State Department revealed that the attackers were linked to Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, a Jordanian-based terrorist considered to be one of al-Qaida's most dangerous. One of Zarqawi's targets was the U.S. Embassy in Amman.

By Saturday morning European news services were quoting an unnamed Jordanian official, who revealed that the al-Qaida plotters planned to use weapons of mass destruction in the foiled attack.

"We found primary materials to make a chemical bomb which, if it had exploded, would have made nearly 20,000 deaths ... in an area of one square kilometre," the official told Agence France-Press.

Another operation planned by the network was to use "deadly gas against the US embassy and the prime minister's office in Amman," he added.

A car belonging to the al-Qaida plotters, containing a chemical bomb and poisonous gas, was intercepted just 75 miles from the Syrian border.

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Saddam's WMD Have Been Found

Insight on the News - World
Issue: 5/11/04

Investigative Report

By Kenneth R. Timmerman

New evidence out of Iraq suggests that the U.S. effort to track down Saddam Hussein's missing weapons of mass destruction (WMD) is having better success than is being reported. Key assertions by the intelligence community that were widely judged in the media and by critics of President George W. Bush as having been false are turning out to have been true after all. But this stunning news has received little attention from the major media, and the president's critics continue to insist that "no weapons" have been found.

In virtually every case - chemical, biological, nuclear and ballistic missiles - the United States has found the weapons and the programs that the Iraqi dictator successfully concealed for 12 years from U.N. weapons inspectors.

The Iraq Survey Group (ISG), whose intelligence analysts are managed by Charles Duelfer, a former State Department official and deputy chief of the U.N.-led arms-inspection teams, has found "hundreds of cases of activities that were prohibited" under U.N. Security Council resolutions, a senior administration official tells Insight. "There is a long list of charges made by the U.S. that have been confirmed, but none of this seems to mean anything because the weapons that were unaccounted for by the United Nations remain unaccounted for."

Both Duelfer and his predecessor, David Kay, reported to Congress that the evidence they had found on the ground in Iraq showed Saddam's regime was in "material violation" of U.N. Security Council Resolution 1441, the last of 17 resolutions that promised "serious consequences" if Iraq did not make a complete disclosure of its weapons programs and dismantle them in a verifiable manner. The United States cited Iraq's refusal to comply with these demands as one justification for going to war.

Both Duelfer and Kay found that Iraq had "a clandestine network of laboratories and safe houses with equipment that was suitable to continuing its prohibited chemical- and biological-weapons [BW] programs," the official said. "They found a prison laboratory where we suspect they tested biological weapons on human subjects." They found equipment for "uranium-enrichment centrifuges" whose only plausible use was as part of a clandestine nuclear-weapons program. In all these cases, "Iraqi scientists had been told before the war not to declare their activities to the U.N. inspectors," the official said.

But while the president's critics and the media might plausibly hide behind ambiguity and a lack of sensational looking finds for not reporting some discoveries, in the case of Saddam's ballistic-missile programs they have no excuse for their silence. "Where were the missiles? We found them," another senior administration official told Insight.

"Saddam Hussein's prohibited missile programs are as close to a slam dunk as you will ever find for violating United Nations resolutions," the first official said. Both senior administration officials spoke to Insight on condition that neither their name nor their agency be identified, but their accounts of what the United States has found in Iraq coincided in every major area.

When former weapons inspector Kay reported to Congress in January that the United States had found "no stockpiles" of forbidden weapons in Iraq, his conclusions made front-page news. But when he detailed what the ISG had found in testimony before the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence last October, few took notice. Among Kay's revelations, which officials tell Insight have been amplified in subsequent inspections in recent weeks:

A prison laboratory complex that may have been used for human testing of BW agents and "that Iraqi officials working to prepare the U.N. inspections were explicitly ordered not to declare to the U.N." Why was Saddam interested in testing biological-warfare agents on humans if he didn't have a biological-weapons program?

"Reference strains" of a wide variety of biological-weapons agents were found beneath the sink in the home of a prominent Iraqi BW scientist. "We thought it was a big deal," a senior administration official said. "But it has been written off [by the press] as a sort of 'starter set.'"

New research on BW-applicable agents, brucella and Congo-Crimean hemorrhagic fever, and continuing work on ricin and aflatoxin that were not declared to the United Nations.

A line of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), or drones, "not fully declared at an undeclared production facility and an admission that they had tested one of their declared UAVs out to a range of 500 kilometers [311 miles], 350 kilometers [217 miles] beyond the permissible limit."

"Continuing covert capability to manufacture fuel propellant useful only for prohibited Scud-variant missiles, a capability that was maintained at least until the end of 2001 and that cooperating Iraqi scientists have said they were told to conceal from the U.N."

"Plans and advanced design work for new long-range missiles with ranges up to at least 1,000 kilometers [621 miles] - well beyond the 150-kilometer-range limit [93 miles] imposed by the U.N. Missiles of a 1,000-kilometer range would have allowed Iraq to threaten targets throughout the Middle East, including Ankara [Turkey], Cairo [Egypt] and Abu Dhabi [United Arab Emirates]."

In addition, through interviews with Iraqi scientists, seized documents and other evidence, the ISG learned the Iraqi government had made "clandestine attempts between late 1999 and 2002 to obtain from North Korea technology related to 1,300-kilometer-range [807 miles] ballistic missiles - probably the No Dong - 300-kilometer-range [186 miles] antiship cruise missiles and other prohibited military equipment," Kay reported.

In testimony before Congress on March 30, Duelfer, revealed that the ISG had found evidence of a "crash program" to construct new plants capable of making chemical- and biological-warfare agents. The ISG also found a previously undeclared program to build a "high-speed rail gun," a device apparently designed for testing nuclear-weapons materials. That came in addition to 500 tons of natural uranium stockpiled at Iraq's main declared nuclear site south of Baghdad, which International Atomic Energy Agency spokesman Mark Gwozdecky acknowledged to Insight had been intended for "a clandestine nuclear-weapons program."

In taking apart Iraq's clandestine procurement network, Duelfer said his investigators had discovered that "the primary source of illicit financing for this system was oil smuggling conducted through government-to-government protocols negotiated with neighboring countries [and] from kickback payments made on contracts set up through the U.N. oil-for-food program" [see "Documents Prove U.N. Oil Corruption," April 27-May 10].

What the president's critics and the media widely have portrayed as the most dramatic failure of the U.S. case against Saddam has been the claimed failure to find "stockpiles" of chemical and biological weapons. But in a June 2003 Washington Post op-ed, former chief U.N. weapons inspector Rolf Ekeus called such criticism "a distortion and a trivialization of a major threat to international peace and security."

The October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate on Iraqi Weapons of Mass Destruction concluded that Saddam "probably has stocked at least 100 metric tons (MT) and possibly as much as 500 MT of CW [chemical warfare] agents - much of it added in the last year." That assessment was based, in part, on conclusions contained in the final report from U.N. weapons inspectors in 1999, which highlighted discrepancies in what the Iraqis reported to the United Nations and the amount of precursor chemicals U.N. arms inspectors could document Iraq had imported but for which it no longer could account. Until now, Bush's critics say, no stockpiles of CW agents made with those precursors have been found. The snap conclusion they draw is that the administration "lied" to the American people to create a pretext for invading Iraq.

But what are "stockpiles" of CW agents supposed to look like? Was anyone seriously expecting Saddam to have left behind freshly painted warehouses packed with chemical munitions, all neatly laid out in serried rows, with labels written in English? Or did they think that a captured Saddam would guide U.S. troops to smoking vats full of nerve gas in an abandoned factory? In fact, as recent evidence made public by a former operations officer for the Coalition Provisional Authority's (CPA's) intelligence unit in Iraq shows, some of those stockpiles have been found - not all at once, and not all in nice working order - but found all the same.

Douglas Hanson was a U.S. Army cavalry reconnaissance officer for 20 years, and a veteran of Gulf War I. He was an atomic demolitions munitions security officer and a nuclear, biological and chemical defense officer. As a civilian analyst in Iraq last summer, he worked for an operations intelligence unit of the CPA in Iraq, and later, with the newly formed Ministry of Science and Technology, which was responsible for finding new, nonlethal employment for Iraqi WMD scientists.

In an interview with Insight and in an article he wrote for the online magazine AmericanThinker.com, Hanson examines reports from U.S. combat units and public information confirming that many of Iraq's CW stockpiles have indeed been found. Until now, however, journalists have devoted scant attention to this evidence, in part because it contradicts the story line they have been putting forward since the U.S.-led inspections began after the war.

But another reason for the media silence may stem from the seemingly undramatic nature of the "finds" Hanson and others have described. The materials that constitute Saddam's chemical-weapons "stockpiles" look an awful lot like pesticides, which they indeed resemble. "Pesticides are the key elements in the chemical-agent arena," Hanson says. "In fact, the general pesticide chemical formula (organophosphate) is the 'grandfather' of modern-day nerve agents."

The United Nations was fully aware that Saddam had established his chemical-weapons plants under the guise of a permitted civilian chemical-industry infrastructure. Plants inspected in the early 1990s as CW production facilities had been set up to appear as if they were producing pesticides - or in the case of a giant plant near Fallujah, chlorine, which is used to produce mustard gas.

When coalition forces entered Iraq, "huge warehouses and caches of 'commercial and agricultural' chemicals were seized and painstakingly tested by Army and Marine chemical specialists," Hanson writes. "What was surprising was how quickly the ISG refuted the findings of our ground forces and how silent they have been on the significance of these caches."

Caches of "commercial and agricultural" chemicals don't match the expectation of "stockpiles" of chemical weapons. But, in fact, that is precisely what they are. "At a very minimum," Hanson tells Insight, "they were storing the precursors to restart a chemical-warfare program very quickly." Kay and Duelfer came to a similar conclusion, telling Congress under oath that Saddam had built new facilities and stockpiled the materials to relaunch production of chemical and biological weapons at a moment's notice.

At Karbala, U.S. troops stumbled upon 55-gallon drums of pesticides at what appeared to be a very large "agricultural supply" area, Hanson says. Some of the drums were stored in a "camouflaged bunker complex" that was shown to reporters - with unpleasant results. "More than a dozen soldiers, a Knight-Ridder reporter, a CNN cameraman, and two Iraqi POWs came down with symptoms consistent with exposure to a nerve agent," Hanson says. "But later ISG tests resulted in a proclamation of negative, end of story, nothing to see here, etc., and the earlier findings and injuries dissolved into nonexistence. Left unexplained is the small matter of the obvious pains taken to disguise the cache of ostensibly legitimate pesticides. One wonders about the advantage an agricultural-commodities business gains by securing drums of pesticide in camouflaged bunkers 6 feet underground. The 'agricultural site' was also colocated with a military ammunition dump - evidently nothing more than a coincidence in the eyes of the ISG."

That wasn't the only significant find by coalition troops of probable CW stockpiles, Hanson believes. Near the northern Iraqi town of Bai'ji, where Saddam had built a chemical-weapons plant known to the United States from nearly 12 years of inspections, elements of the 4th Infantry Division found 55-gallon drums containing a substance identified through mass spectrometry analysis as cyclosarin - a nerve agent. Nearby were surface-to-surface and surface-to-air missiles, gas masks and a mobile laboratory that could have been used to mix chemicals at the site. "Of course, later tests by the experts revealed that these were only the ubiquitous pesticides that everybody was turning up," Hanson says. "It seems Iraqi soldiers were obsessed with keeping ammo dumps insect-free, according to the reading of the evidence now enshrined by the conventional wisdom that 'no WMD stockpiles have been discovered.'"

At Taji - an Iraqi weapons complex as large as the District of Columbia - U.S. combat units discovered more "pesticides" stockpiled in specially built containers, smaller in diameter but much longer than the standard 55-gallon drum. Hanson says he still recalls the military sending digital images of the canisters to his office, where his boss at the Ministry of Science and Technology translated the Arabic-language markings. "They were labeled as pesticides," he says. "Gee, you sure have got a lot of pesticides stored in ammo dumps."

Again, this January, Danish forces found 120-millimeter mortar shells filled with a mysterious liquid that initially tested positive for blister agents. But subsequent tests by the United States disputed that finding. "If it wasn't a chemical agent, what was it?" Hanson asks. "More pesticides? Dish-washing detergent? From this old soldier's perspective, I gain nothing from putting a liquid in my mortar rounds unless that stuff will do bad things to the enemy."

The discoveries Hanson describes are not dramatic. And that's the problem: Finding real stockpiles in grubby ammo dumps doesn't fit the image the media and the president's critics carefully have fed to the public of what Iraq's weapons ought to look like.

A senior administration official who has gone through the intelligence reporting from Iraq as well as the earlier reports from U.N. arms inspectors refers to another well-documented allegation. "The Iraqis admitted they had made 3.9 tons of VX," a powerful nerve gas, but claimed they had never weaponized it. The U.N. inspectors "felt they had more. But where did it go?" The Iraqis never provided any explanation of what had happened to their VX stockpiles.

What does 3.9 tons of VX look like? "It could fit in one large garage," the official says. Assuming, of course, that Saddam would assemble every bit of VX gas his scientists had produced at a single site, that still amounts to one large garage in an area the size of the state of California.

Senior administration officials stress that the investigation will continue as inspectors comb through millions of pages of documents in Iraq and attempt to interview Iraqi weapons scientists who have been trained all their professional lives to conceal their activities from the outside world.

"The conditions under which the ISG is working are not very conducive," one official said. "But this president wants the truth to come out. This is not an exercise in spinning or censoring."

For more on WMD, read "Iraqi Weapons in Syria"

Kenneth R. Timmerman is a senior writer for Insight.
email the author

Copyright © 1990-2003 News World Communications, Inc

Chemical munitions found by Polish soldiers were being pursued by terrorists

www.sfgate.com

- MONIKA SCISLOWSKA, Associated Press Writer
Friday, July 2, 2004

(07-02) 07:18 PDT WARSAW, Poland (AP) --

Terrorists may have been close to obtaining munitions containing the deadly nerve agent cyclosarin that Polish soldiers recovered last month in Iraq, the head of Poland's military intelligence said Friday.

Polish troops had been searching for munitions as part of their regular mission in south-central Iraq when they were told by an informant in May that terrorists had made a bid to buy the chemical weapons, which date back to Saddam Hussein's war with Iran in the 1980s, Gen. Marek Dukaczewski told reporters in Warsaw.

"We were mortified by the information that terrorists were looking for these warheads and offered $5,000 apiece," Dukaczewski said. "An attack with such weapons would be hard to imagine. All of our activity was accelerated at appropriating these warheads."

Dukaczewski refused to give any further details about the terrorists or the sellers of the munitions, saying only that his troops thwarted terrorists by purchasing the 17 rockets for a Soviet-era launcher and two mortar rounds containing the nerve agent for an undisclosed sum June 23.

In May, a booby-trapped artillery shell apparently filled with the sarin nerve agent exploded alongside a Baghdad road but caused no serious injuries to the U.S. forces who discovered it. At the time, officials stopped short of claiming the munition was definite evidence of a large weapons stockpile in prewar Iraq or evidence of recent production by Saddam's regime.

The warheads all contained cyclosarin, multinational force commander Polish Gen. Mieczyslaw Bieniek said.

"Laboratory tests showed the presence in them of cyclosarin, a very toxic gas, five times stronger than sarin and five times more durable," Bieniek told Poland's TVN24 at the force's Camp Babylon headquarters.

"If these warheads, which were still usable, were used on a military base like Camp Babylon, they would have caused unforeseeable damage."

The tests were done by U.S. experts, who were conducting more.

The munitions were found in a bunker in the Polish sector, but Polish officials refused to be more specific.

URL: http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/news/archive/2004/07/02/international1018EDT0516.DTL

©2004 Associated Press

Reply 1 - Posted by: SmithL, 7/2/2004 10:33:05 AM So the terrorists know that there are no WMDs.

Reply 2 - Posted by: GoPack, 7/2/2004 10:38:17 AM Plants. Must have been. MOTP told us months ago we had already found the only WMDs left in Iraq.

Reply 3 - Posted by: simkeith, 7/2/2004 10:39:04 AM More Bush lies. There are no WMD's in Iraq. Just ask MOTP. *saecasm off*

Reply 4 - Posted by: Pythagoras, 7/2/2004 10:44:13 AM Wow. I sent this to all my liberal friends and asked them to explain it.

Reply 5 - Posted by: pallis, 7/2/2004 10:50:12 AM Oh come on guys. Who was Saddam going to use these chemicals against, ...his own people? Give me a break. He was just a nice, grandpappy-type, jolly old man. And we're just big meanies for upsetting him and his wonderful sons. After all, didn't everyone vote for him, including a few dead Democrats?

Reply 6 - Posted by: jleev, 7/2/2004 10:50:33 AM OK, if I hear anymore crap about "no WMD's", I'll scream. Someone--PLEASE spread this news to the LSM and the rest of the Michael Moore's out there!!!!!

Reply 7 - Posted by: msjena, 7/2/2004 10:50:56 AM Didn't anyone tell the terrorists there were no WMDs?

Reply 8 - Posted by: MeanWestTexan, 7/2/2004 10:52:17 AM But these WMD were "old" and thus harmless. So sayeth Reuters, so let it be done.

Reply 9 - Posted by: whitey, 7/2/2004 10:52:46 AM Why are terrorists seeking out Iraqi WMD if they don't exisit? I thought Bush lied about Iraqi WMD and led us into a war under false pretenses. Perhaps the left will explain this little discrepency for us.

Reply 10 - Posted by: mobyclik, 7/2/2004 10:59:24 AM "Laboratory tests showed the presence in them of cyclosarin, a very toxic gas, five times stronger than sarin and five times more durable," But none of them had ''Property of Saddam Hussein'' written on them. Therefore, they don't count.

Reply 11 - Posted by: Halfgenius, 7/2/2004 11:00:59 AM The LMSM has discovered the WMD...(Weapons if Mass Delusions) they were under our noses all along. Those little kettle of fishes containing various deadly compounds were just unfinished experiments leftover from Dick Cheney and Haliburton's evil attempt to obfuscate the matter...so sayeth the LMSM.

Reply 12 - Posted by: veritas, 7/2/2004 11:06:40 AM "Truth has no friends on the Left. Why should it, as it does not serve their ends?" ~~ veritas "Unless a liberal shouts out 'I did it!' in a Perry Mason climax, liberals say conservatives have proved nothing." ~~ Ann Coulter [Hooray for the Poles! Kielbasa for lunch, anyone?]

Reply 13 - Posted by: amereagle, 7/2/2004 11:07:57 AM This is like the 8th story about WMD in Iraq. How is it that the Liberal Media and Michael Moores (traitors, all) of the world continue to get away with their lies!!!???

Reply 14 - Posted by: CEP, 7/2/2004 11:09:13 AM They were found by Polish troops, afterall they are polish, the MSM doesn't count them, remember. It would also upset their neat little story about there being no WMD's. So they go on with their hands over their eyes and cotton in their ears repeating, over and over, NO WMD's, NO WMD's.

Reply 15 - Posted by: jkstewart2, 7/2/2004 11:23:21 AM If we can't believe the nightly news, who can we believe... I'm so confused

Reply 16 - Posted by: Talk2, 7/2/2004 11:26:12 AM This report is sooooooo scary that this country owes a huge debt of gratitide to the Polish forces for taking these WMD off the market. Since the MSM is in full Vietnam War mode doing their best to turn every victory into a defeat and every positive into a negative you can bet they won't give this much play because it contradicts their personal war against Bush.

Reply 17 - Posted by: ProudVet, 7/2/2004 11:31:26 AM Something to consider. The terrorists were pursuing these particular WMD. But how do we know they haven't pursued them before and actually now have them.

Reply 18 - Posted by: TheTech, 7/2/2004 11:32:58 AM On our next trek to Europe my wife and spending our money in Poland. Seriously!

Reply 19 - Posted by: refried, 7/2/2004 11:36:36 AM How difficult is it to remove s gas container from a shell? Seems to me that this would be a perfect weapon for terrorists to smuggle into Europe or the US!

Reply 20 - Posted by: Sazedog, 7/2/2004 11:37:30 AM But, but, Traitor Kerry, the LMM (Leftist Major Media), the entire liberal establishment, France and Germany (who sold Iraq the components), plus the U.N. told us that there were no WMD in Iraq. Could they all have been wrong? Or were they all lying to keep the food-for-oil scam going?

Reply 21 - Posted by: SteelBreeze, 7/2/2004 11:44:15 AM Yes, since WMD have been found several times, how do know the terrorists don't already have them and are plotting something big. This is scary folks.

Reply 22 - Posted by: tnc, 7/2/2004 11:45:52 AM So I guess maybe the president wasn't lying. President Clinton, that is. Since he too said Iraq had WMD. When the anti Bush media are so quick to accuse him of lying they forget that their idol Bill made the same assertions. It was OK for him to lie. Though it turns out both presidents were right.

Reply 23 - Posted by: mythman, 7/2/2004 11:54:27 AM WMDs PLUS Terrorists. The President is owed about 50 million apologies.

Reply 24 - Posted by: NorthernDog, 7/2/2004 11:55:47 AM Sounds like the Polish troops aren't telling the whole story and the media is not asking. I'll have to laugh if a huge load of WMD is wheeled out during the DimRat Convention.

Reply 25 - Posted by: david999, 7/2/2004 11:55:48 AM The terrorists know there are WMD's The news nedia says no only because a republican is president

Reply 26 - Posted by: ketchuplover, 7/2/2004 12:24:35 PM The argument that they were old really has no play because remember - the "UN" was trying to get Iraq to account for "missing" wmd's that they had accounted for earlier. Iraq denied it had any.

Reply 27 - Posted by: david999, 7/2/2004 12:39:49 PM Old or New WMD's Doesn't matter, they still can kill you

Reply 28 - Posted by: Wyn, 7/2/2004 1:11:35 PM Right off the bat this story of false, they said the 'WMD' were found by Polish Soldiers. Impossible, after all, the war in Iraq is Unilateral!!! /sarcasm

Reply 29 - Posted by: nofreelunch, 7/2/2004 1:13:48 PM This is pure bee ess. I have it on firm authority from motp, KCSTAN, AnaL Gore, the 9/11 Commission, and hundreds of liberal media pundits that there are no WMD in Iraq. In fact, I'm sure to some of these Clymers there were no WMD in Iraq when Saddam used them on the Kurds. This type of nonsense shouldn't be posted on this site. If it keeps happening, these tinfoil hats may actually be forced to admit they were ... WRONG. We wouldn't want to injure their self-esteem, would we?

Reply 30 - Posted by: right-turn, 7/2/2004 1:24:20 PM Any way we can get a couple and put them on the desks of Rather, Jennings, Brokaw, Couric, Kerry, NYT, Moore... and ask them to open them up???

Reply 31 - Posted by: shelley, 7/2/2004 1:24:46 PM It's like stories like these enter a news black hole . . .

Reply 32 - Posted by: COGOP, 7/2/2004 1:37:58 PM This article needs to be printed in bold-face type, and stapled to Michael Moore's forehead. Not that it would do any good about his incessant lying, but at least we wouldn't have to look at his face.

Reply 33 - Posted by: pepperblue, 7/2/2004 1:48:20 PM Interesting thought #24. Wouldn't it be delicious to have the LSM covering overwhelming proof of WMD during the RAT convention, or at least the day JFKerry speechifies.

Reply 34 - Posted by: LovsGOP, 7/2/2004 1:50:04 PM Who you have to blame is that goofy David Kay who spewed, "We were all wrong." Well looks like that goon would not know a WMD even if they were on his moustache.

Reply 35 - Posted by: jatfla , 7/2/2004 2:20:57 PM Just what I was thinking #28...AND the tests were being conducted by the US so that means it's all manufactured evidence anyway. AND certain people are getting angry with Ashcroft and Homeland Security for reminding us to be alert and watchful. This Administration seem to take all of this stuff a lot more seriously than most Americans who have their heads in the sand. I'm reminded of our President's response to a question about his unpopularity among Europeans. He thought for a few seconds and then said, "Well, it's my job to protect the American people and that's what I plan to do...." Basically saying he didn't care if he was "popular" or not; that wasn't his number 1 priority.

Reply 36 - Posted by: mominNoCA, 7/2/2004 2:31:03 PM What are the chances that Peter Jennings will mention this?

Reply 37 - Posted by: RedDwarf, 7/2/2004 2:31:32 PM Re reply #32, Rather than use staples, I recommend railroad spikes. The extra large holes might let a little common sense & truth seep in.

Reply 38 - Posted by: Photoonist, 7/2/2004 2:58:48 PM Cyclosarin is probably the chemical that was in the artillery shells found by Dutch troops last year as well. Recall tht we were only ever told what the WEREN'T, ie. they weren't mustard gas, but that the shells contained a clear liquid. Leftists must still be insisting that it was Perrier water to be used to welcome French troops.

Reply 39 - Posted by: Brown Bear, 7/2/2004 3:06:36 PM Somebody please share this information with the malicious cretins at the New York Times and the White House Press Corpse.

Reply 40 - Posted by: gmholler, 7/2/2004 3:16:44 PM Anyone have another source for this story? I refuse to read anything from sfgate.com - I am SO sick of the "Donate to Kerry" ads on that site!

Reply 41 - Posted by: mustng66, 7/2/2004 4:22:57 PM test

Reply 42 - Posted by: mikkins, 7/2/2004 5:09:39 PM From an updated Reuters news story: "Poland said it "purchased" the shells through individuals who contacted army officials in its military zone in south-central Iraq. "We bought all the shells available ... Terrorists are seeking these missiles on the black market, offering a price of around $5,000 per warhead," Dukaczewski said, adding that Poland had no evidence that any chemical weapons fell into such hands." Also "In Baghdad, the U.S. military issued a statement saying that two 122 mm rockets found by Polish forces had tested positive for sarin gas and confirmed that they were left over from the Iran-Iraq war, but said they posed little danger." http://www.reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml?type=worldNews&storyID=5578193

Reply 43 - Posted by: jacooley, 7/2/2004 6:25:54 PM Quick, somebody notify Sean Penn! He must be alerted!

Reply 44 - Posted by: Dimpled Darling, 7/2/2004 8:21:12 PM God bless those Polish soldiers! As for the MSM, I have to classify them as terrorists as they continually defend them and denigrate President Bush and his administration. They are in cahoots with the terrorists and should be hauled in for treason.

Enriched Uranium Removed From Iraq

Reprinted from NewsMax.com
Tuesday, July 6, 2004 11:01 p.m. EDT

Nearly two tons of low-enriched uranium has been removed from an Iraqi nuclear facility in a secret operation conducted by the U.S. Energy Department.

The quantity of nuclear material, stored at the al-Tuwaitha research complex southeast of Baghdad, was probably enough to give Saddam Hussein the capacity to produce at least one atomic bomb, according to a physicist with the Federation of American Scientists quoted by the Associated Press. The fear that Saddam could produce nuclear weapons was cited by congressional Democrats two years ago when they voted to authorize the Bush administration to go to war in Iraq.

Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham described the previously undisclosed operation, which was concluded June 23, as "a major achievement" in an attempt to "keep potentially dangerous nuclear material out of the hands of terrorists," the AP said.

Ivan Oelrich, a physicist at the Federation of American Scientists, hesitated to characterize the threat posed by Saddam's enriched uranium because few details were provided by the Energy Department.

But he said that the low-enriched uranium taken from Iraq, if it is of the 3 percent to 5 percent level of enrichment common in fuel for commercial power reactors, could be used to produce enough highly enriched uranium to make a single nuclear bomb.

The Energy Department said that in addition to 1.95 tons of low-enriched uranium, "roughly 1,000 highly radioactive sources . . . [that] could potentially be used in a radiological dispersal device [or dirty bomb]" were also transported out of Iraq.

According to Bryan Wilkes, spokesman for the Energy Department's National Nuclear Security Administration, much of the radioactive material - which had been used for medical and industrial purposes - "was in powdered form, which is easily dispersed."

Wilkes said that some of the other radioactive material - including cesium-137, colbalt-60 and strontium - could have been valuable to a terrorist seeking to fashion a radiological bomb.

The Energy Department refused to say to where the material was shipped.

Editor's note:
The Iraqi "Deck of Death" playing cards ? Get yours today!

Read more on this subject in related Hot Topics:
Saddam Hussein/Iraq
War on Terrorism