First Chemical Weapons Found?

I think this is somewhat incriminating, even if it turns out to be some kind of anti nerve agent. It's a pretty good indicator of what they'll find next.

 

I find the date of this article very significant. I believe chemical suits were found on the 27th of March. Two months after this story ran.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/2690163.stm

Friday, 24 January, 2003, 14:27 GMT
Iraq 'preparing for chemical war'
BBC.co.uk

Documents smuggled out of Iraq by an opposition group appear to indicate that Baghdad is equipping key units with protection against chemical weapons.
The hand-written papers, said to have been smuggled out by the Iraqi opposition, refer to new chemical warfare suits to protect soldiers and distribution of the drug atropine to counter the effects of nerve gas.

The notes, passed on by the opposition Iraqi National Coalition to the BBC, also included details for attacking ships in the Gulf.

BBC diplomatic correspondent Bridget Kendall says the Iraqi opposition groups that provided these documents has vested interests in seeing Saddam Hussein undermined, so it is very difficult to assess whether we should believe the documents.

She adds that the timing of their release is significant at a time when the United States and the UK are trying to win over opinion to their approach to the Iraq crisis.

A spokesperson for UK Prime Minister Tony Blair said the documents would fit with Saddam Hussein's efforts to hide weapons of mass destruction.

BBC defence correspondent Paul Adams says US and British planners have speculated on the possibility of Iraq using drones to spray chemical weapons on coalition troops, but there is no conclusive proof this has been done.

Opposition in Exile

The Iraqi National Coalition is a group of former Iraqi army officers who have turned against Saddam Hussein and are now living in exile.

The Secretary General of the coalition, Tawfik al-Yassiri - a former brigadier-general - told the BBC's Today programme that the documents originated from serving members of the Iraqi military.

"We have members of our organisation in most of the camps and cities in Iraq, from soldiers to generals," he said.

Mr al-Yassiri said the information had been verified through various sources.

Iraq's Republican Guard and Special Republican Guard are among the recipients of special suits and atropine, according to the documents.

A former arms inspector, Bill Tierney, told Today that "if both these two units have new equipment, then it would indicate that they are prepared to use chemical weapons".

The report of Iraqi war preparations is bound to intrigue UN weapons inspectors, the BBC's Rageh Omaar reports from Baghdad.

According to a UK Government report last year and UN inspectors' findings, Iraq has undeclared stocks of VX and sarin nerve agent. It is thought Iraq could deploy such chemicals quickly.

 

MSNBC Article

 

Whether the argument was that there are no terrorist links to Iraq or there was no chemical weapons, it's time to follow MacArthur's advice and just fade away.

 

I heard the spin was that it was a NBC training facility...Anyone else hear that?

 

initial tests on the powder show that is is some sort of explosive rather than chemical or biological in nature.
A shocker!!!

The US better get its *ss in gear and start planting evidence or we will end up with egg on our face.

 

Don't believe all of MSNBC. They're not quite as one-sided as Fox "News," but they will report anything the administration says. Like, last week, when we burst in on some half-assed laboratory, and there was some Iraqi there, with "suspected ties to Al Qaeda." Ahem.

What, was he wearing his Al Qaeda I.D. card?

Was he attending an Al Qaeda meeting?

"Hello, my name is Abdul, and I am a terrorist."

(the group responds) "HI, ABDUL!!"

"I haven't bombed anything for six months...but I'm working on it."

This administration will tell us anything to make us believe Iraq and Al Qaeda are tied together.

 

Stratfor.com is reporting this: 1445 GMT - U.S. Marines have detected large quantities of cyanide and mustard agents in the Euphrates River near An Nasiriyah, according to a reporter embedded with the troops.

Also, MSNBC found ricin & botulinum at that al-cacaeeeddda camp in N. Iraq:

http://www.msnbc.com/news/895185.asp?0cv=CA01

SARGAT, Iraq, April 4 — MSNBC.com tests reveal evidence of the deadly toxins ricin and botulinum at a laboratory in a remote mountain region of northern Iraq allegedly used as a terrorist training camp by Islamic militants with ties to the al-Qaida terrorist network. The U.S. Central Intelligence Agency is conducting its own tests at the same area, but has not yet released the results, according to officials in northern Iraq.

 

Of course we're going to find sh*t...

 

That's typical man, they actually start finding stuff and all of the sudden they are planting it? What will it take for you to believe they have WMD's? Do you need to go over there and find them yourself? Does Iraq actually have to use them (again) to prove it?

Do you believe that everything the govt does is just a big conspiracy?

 

You forgot to include this little tid bit. Not that we eventually will not find anything.

 

It's actually kind of interesting to me that the Iraqi Information Minister is quoted as saying Iraq won't use WMDs, which implies that they do have them but just won't use them.

Not that that means anything necessarily.

 

As a response, this makes no sense. The stuff that they are finding is not WMD.

Let's review. Using our intell as basis for action, Bush starts a war. This intell is called useless by the UN inspection teams. This intell lead our military to the Top 10 WMD sites, in which no WMD were found. To say that our intell is suspect is a major understatement.

I think Iraq most likely does have some WMD, based solely on their prior behavior. But I will not be surprised if little or no WMD is turned up by the US.

The consequences of the US finding no WMD would call into question our justification for this war. The political failout for the Bush Admin both domestically and internationally would be dramatic. To avert such fallout, I would not find it an impossibility, that the Bush Admin would plant WMD.

 

Coalition Discovers Suspicious Sites Near Baghdad
Foxnews.com

Friday, April 04, 2003

NEAR BAGHDAD, Iraq — U.S. troops on Friday found thousands of boxes of white powder, nerve agent antidote, unidentified liquid and Arabic documents on how to engage in chemical warfare, U.S. military officials said.

Forces made the discovery at an industrial site south of Baghdad.

Reuters reported that they also found a second site containing vials of unidentified liquid and white powder. A U.S. officer said the site was close to the other plant, at the Latifiyah industrial complex, about 25 miles south of Baghdad, where soldiers had found the other vials and manuals.

"It is clearly a suspicious site," Col. John Peabody, engineer brigade commander of the 3rd Infantry Division, said of the first site.

Also discovered was atropine, used to counter the effects of exposure to chemical agents, and 2-Pam chloride, which is used in combination with atropine in case of chemical attack.

But a senior U.S. official in Washington who is familiar with initial testing said the materials at the first site were believed to be explosives.

"Initial reports are that the material is probably just explosives, but we're still going through the place," the official said.

The plant itself was shown on U.S. military maps as including underground storage facilities, Reuters reported. Some contained liquid, some powder. The books and manuals were in a safe, Captain Kevin Jackson told Reuters near Baghdad.

Peabody said troops found thousands of 2-inch by 5-inch boxes, each containing three vials of white powder, together with documents written in Arabic that dealt with how to engage in chemical warfare.

The facility had been identified by the International Atomic Energy Agency as a suspected chemical, biological and nuclear weapons site. U.N. inspectors visited the plant at least a dozen times, including as recently as Feb. 18.

The facility is part of a larger complex known as the Latifiyah Explosives and Ammunition Plant al Qa Qaa.

Brig. Gen. Vincent Brooks told reporters during a U.S. Central Command briefing in Qatar Friday that special forces in Iraq's western desert also found what they believed to be a training school for handling nuclear, chemical and biological warfare in the western desert of Iraq.

At least one bottle of the deadly chemical weapon, Tabun, was reportedly found. Tabun is a clear, colorless and tasteless liquid with a slightly fruity odor, and is lethal.

If skin absorption is great enough, death may occur in one to two minutes, or it may be delayed for one to two hours. Lethal respiratory dosages kill in one to 10 minutes, and liquid in the eye kills almost as rapidly.

The U.S. government says the nerve agent may have been used during the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq war. The soldiers found only a small amount of the chemical, indicating the site was meant for training, not storing or deploying chemical weapons, Brooks said.

"In that particular site, we believe that was the only sample," Brooks said. "That's why we believe it was a training site. Our conclusion is that this was not a (weapons of mass destruction) site ... it proved to be far less than that."

Photos of the site showed shelves of brown bottles with yellow labels. Brooks said troops did not understand some of the labels and were collecting the bottles for examination by experts.

During the 1991 Gulf War, U.S. jets bombed the Latifiyah plant.

Iraqi Information Minister Mohammed Saeed al-Sahaf said Friday Iraq had no plans to use chemical or biological weapons against invading coalition despite a threat in the same breath to use "non-conventional" methods.

"But we will conduct a kind of martyrdom operations," he said during a press conference.

On April 1, Iraqi Vice President Taha Yassin Ramadan, in a statement on Iraqi television, repeated Baghdad's position that it had no weapons of mass destruction. Referring to reports that gas masks and other chemical gear had been found elsewhere in the country, he said the coalition might plant weapons of mass destruction to implicate Iraq.

"Let me say one more time that Iraq is free of weapons of mass destruction," he said. "The aggressors may themselves intend to bring those materials to plant them here and say those are weapons of mass destruction."

Brooks said it's possible there are other weapons of mass destruction buried in the desert or stored in other locations.

"There are places we think weapons may have been stored," Brooks said in response to a reporter's question as to how coalition forces will avoid harmful contact with such weapons. "We don't want to create a weapons of mass destruction hazard … only the regime knows where they are for sure."

Earlier this week, Fox News reported that evidence was found in the Kurdish-controlled regions of northern Iraq that the Islamic militant group Ansar al-Islam was working on three types of chlorine gas and ricin and has ties to Al Qaeda.

U.S. sources said that documents and equipment were found in the rubble of an Ansar facility were described as "a cookbook and kitchen" for chemical weapons.

 

One note I find interesting about this story is the denial by the Iraq Ministry of Defense. The Coalition forces discover LOTs of white powder, an unknown substance, later determined to be some type of explosive. They found a large quantity of a substance, describe it, and tell exactly where they found it.

The response by the Iraq government should have been "It's not chemical weapons, it's stuff used to make explosives." That would have made the US forces look silly. Instead they start with accusations that the substance was planted.

The idea that the US government would plant evidence is rediculous. In order to "plant" a credible amount of WMD, they would have to obtain a large quantity which didn't match the US stocks, and involve a lot of people in multiple locations. They'd have to hush the people planting it, and the people monitoring entrance into the company/airspace. They'd also have to get around allied forces and the 600 reporters imbedded with US forces. It won't happen.