L
Leythos
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,120137,00.html
"The Iraqi Survey Group confirmed today that a 155-millimeter artillery
round containing sarin nerve agent had been found," Brig. Gen. Mark
Kimmitt (search), the chief military spokesman in Iraq, told reporters
in Baghdad. "The round had been rigged as an IED (improvised explosive
device) which was discovered by a U.S. force convoy."
....
Two weeks ago, U.S. military units discovered mustard gas that was used
as part of an IED. Tests conducted by the Iraqi Survey Group (search) ?
a U.S. organization searching for weapons of mass destruction ? and
others concluded the mustard gas was "stored improperly," which made the
gas "ineffective."
They believe the mustard gas shell may have been one of 550 projectiles
for which former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein failed to account when
he made his weapons declaration shortly before Operation Iraqi Freedom
began last year. Iraq also failed to then account for 450 aerial bombs
with mustard gas. That, combined with the shells, totaled about 80 tons
of unaccounted for mustard gas.
It also appears some top Pentagon officials were surprised by the sarin
news; they thought the matter was classified, administration officials
told Fox News.
An official at the U.N. Monitoring, Verification and Inspection
Commission (UNMOVIC) headquarters in New York said the commission is
surprised to hear news of the mustard gas.
Oh, the most important part: Monday, May 17, 2004
********
Oh, and another news article that disputes most of what you say:
http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=38213
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.
.....
What's really sad is how this information was spun by the media that
didn't want to be proven wrong:
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.'"
