ISIS In Iraq Find Saddam Hussein’s WMD Stockpiles Of Chemical Weapons

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ISIS In Iraq Find Saddam Hussein’s WMD Stockpiles Of Chemical Weapons, George Bush was Right?



Did the ISIS in Iraq find Saddam Hussein’s WMD stockpiles of chemical weapons? While the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria has been confirmed to have seized an old chemical weapons plant there seems to be a dispute over whether or not the remaining tons of chemical weapons like sarin and mustard could still be weaponized into a dangerous form.

In a related report by The Inquisitr, former CIA director Michael Hayden is claiming that the ISIS in Iraq have essentially won the war at this point and that it is very likely the nation will be split into three sections. Due to the Iraq crisis oil prices have jumped and some Americans may wonder whether this means U.S. gas prices will be rising soon, as well. But as it turns out China has a lot more to lose if Iraq’s oil supply is blocked even though America spent trillions of dollars on the Iraq war.

After the end of the Iraq War, Saddam’s missing WMDs were very controversial, leading some to claim President George W Bush lied about Iraq’s WMD programs. As one of the reasons for going to war, Bush had argued Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction might end up in the hands of terrorist groups like ISIS. The main problem with Bush’s claim was that after the world’s intelligence services had underestimated Hussein’s WMD capabilities before Desert Storm they mistakenly compensated by overestimating the progress Saddam had made in rebuilding his weapons program. There was also a lot of controversy over the outing of Valerie Plame and Joseph Wilson’s investigation into whether Saddam had managed to procure a new source for nuclear weapons materials.

After Iraq was occupied, reports from the CIA in 2005 concluded they found much of Iraq’s WMD development programs, which included a very limited development nuclear weapons program, 550 metric tons of yellowcake uranium dating from before 1991, maintenance of dual-usage chemical weapons technology, and an unexpected air force buried in the sand, but no large stockpiles of chemical weapons or other major WMDs… at first.



Wikileaks revealed in 2010 that during the occupation of Iraq the U.S. military discovered many small caches of chemical weapons, but others claimed that Russia had helped Hussein hide the most dangerous WMD stockpiles in Syria. The plot took a new twist when Syrian rebels began identifying weapons that came from Iraq last year. Then when Russia began to oversee Assad’s supposed disarmament of chemical weapons John A. Shaw, the former Pentagon official who claims to have tracked Iraq’s WMDs being moved out by Russian special forces, claimed that it was possible some of these chemical weapons were being hid back in Iraq.



With that history behind us, now The Telegraph reports that Iraq’s WMD programs may in fact end up being used by the al-Qaeda linked terrorist group ISIS:

“The jihadist group bringing terror to Iraq overran a Saddam Hussein chemical weapons complex on Thursday, gaining access to disused stores of hundreds of tonnes of potentially deadly poisons including mustard gas and sarin…. Isis has shown ambitions to seize and use chemical weapons in Syria leading experts to warn last night that the group could turn to improvised weapons to carry out a deadly attack in Iraq.”

Hamish de Bretton-Gordon, a former commander of Britain’s chemical weapons regiment, believes ISIS will not be able to build a fully functional WMD using Iraq’s chemical weapon stockpiles since they’re buried in concrete but they could still be dangerous:

“It is doubtful that Isis have the expertise to use a fully functioning chemical munition but there are materials on site that could be used in an improvised explosive device. We have seen that Isis has used chemicals in explosions in Iraq before and has carried out experiments in Syria.”

Even back in 2006 Army Colonel John Chu told the House Armed Services Committee that the leftover chemical weapons constituted a security threat:

“These are chemical weapons as defined under the Chemical Weapons Convention, and yes… they do constitute weapons of mass destruction…. Mustard is a blister agent (that) actually produces burning of any area (where) an individual may come in contact with the agent. Regardless of (how much material in the weapon is actually chemical agent), any remaining agent is toxic. Anything above zero (percent agent) would prove to be toxic, and if you were exposed to it long enough, lethal.”

Of course, how much of a threat anything ISIS manages to grab now is debatable. The State Department’s spokesperson Jen Psaki commented on the recent situation:

“We remain concerned about the seizure of any military site by the ISIL. We do not believe that the complex contains CW materials of military value and it would be very difficult, if not impossible, to safely move the materials.”

Are you surprised that former President George W Bush may have been right about Iraq’s WMD programs created by Saddam Hussein?


Read more at ISIS In Iraq Find Saddam Hussein’s WMD Stockpiles Of Chemical Weapons… George W Bush Was Right?
 

Blackleaf

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Anyone with an ounce of common sense knows that Madman Hussein had WMD. Just ask the Kurds of Halabja.
 

tay

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He should have used them when the Muricans were coming for him............
 

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Saddam’s WMDs: The Left’s Iraq Lies Exposed

June 23, 2014 by Arnold Ahlert
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Arnold Ahlert is a former NY Post op-ed columnist currently contributing to JewishWorldReview.com, HumanEvents.com and CanadaFreePress.com. He may be reached at atahlert@comcast.net.



The recent turmoil in Iraq brought on by the rise of the Sunni extremist group known as the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) has ironically struck a blow to the American Left’s endlessly repeated narrative that there were no weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) in Iraq prior to the war. The State Department and other U.S. government officials have revealed that ISIS now occupies the Al Muthanna Chemicals Weapons Complex. Al Muthanna was Saddam Hussein’s primary chemical weapons facility, and it is located less than 50 miles from Baghdad.

The Obama administration claims that the weapons in that facility, which include sarin, mustard gas, and nerve agent VX, manufactured to prosecute the war against Iran in the 1980s, do not pose a threat because they are old, contaminated and hard to move. “We do not believe that the complex contains CW materials of military value and it would be very difficult, if not impossible, to safely move the materials,” said State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki.

The administration’s dubious rationale is based on information provided by the Iraq Study Group, which was tasked with finding WMDs in the war’s aftermath. They found the chemical weapons at Al Muthanna, but they determined that both Iraq wars and inspections by the United Nations Special Commission (UNSCOM) had successfully dismantled the facility, and that the remaining chemical weapons were rendered useless and sealed in bunkers. The report called the weapons facility “a wasteland full of destroyed chemical munitions, razed structures, and unusable war-ravaged facilities,” the 2004 report stated.

Yet other sections of the same report were hardly reassuring. “Stockpiles of chemical munitions are still stored there,” it stated. “The most dangerous ones have been declared to the UN and are sealed in bunkers. Although declared, the bunkers’ contents have yet to be confirmed.” It added, “These areas of the compound pose a hazard to civilians and potential black-marketers.”

Another report paints an even more disturbing picture of the Muthanna facility. It warned that the number and status of Saddam’s sarin-filled rockets were unknown because facilities were not able to be inspected, leaving investigators only able to surmise about the weapons’ condition. Even in degraded conditions, the report said, these rockets still posed a proliferation risk:
Although the damaged Bunker 13 at Muthanna contained thousands of sarin-filled rockets, the presence of leaking munitions and unstable propellant and explosive charges made it too hazardous for UNSCOM inspectors to enter. Because the rockets could not be recovered safely, Iraq declared the munitions in Bunker 13 as ‘destroyed in the Gulf War’ and they were not included in the inventory of chemical weapons eliminated under UNSCOM supervision.

Because of the hazardous conditions in Bunker 13, UNSCOM inspectors were unable to make an accurate inventory of its contents before sealing the entrances in 1994. As a result, no record exists of the exact number or status of the sarin-filled rockets remaining in the bunker. … In the worst-case scenario, the munitions could contain as much as 15,000 liters of sarin. Although it is likely that the nerve agent has degraded substantially after nearly two decades of storage under suboptimal conditions, UNMOVIC cautioned that ‘the levels of degradation of the sarin fill in the rockets cannot be determined without exploring the bunker and taking samples from intact warheads.’ If the sarin remains highly toxic and many of the rockets are still intact, they could pose a proliferation risk.”
Nonetheless, U.S. officials, who claimed they were well aware of the facility insisted that the United States wouldn’t have left it there if it were a genuine threat. They also continued to stress that the takeover by ISIS doesn’t constitute a military gain by the group because the weapons would prove useless, even if ISIS were able to penetrated the sealed bunkers where they are stored. ISIS has reportedly yet to gain access to the bunkers.

However, there are numerous holes in these assessments. The Obama administration, eager to leave a “sovereign, stable, and self-reliant Iraq” as the president described it in 2011, paid little heed to the prospect of large swaths of that nation being overrun by terrorists who have taken over key cities and military bases, and confiscated sophisticated American military equipment in the process. One defense official conceded as much, telling the Wall Street Journal that had they known the Maliki government would lose control so soon, they might not have left the weapons behind. And Psaki’s contention that the weapons could not be moved safely even by terrorists is hardly reassuring when one considers the reality that ISIS uses suicide bombings as one of it chief military tactics.

A far more critical consideration is the possibility that many of the Iraqi Sunnis who have joined ISIS due in large part to their alienation by the Shi’ite-dominated government of Nouri al-Maliki are comprised of former Saddam Hussein loyalists, some of whom may have working knowledge of the chemical weapons stored at Al Muthanna. Former WMD specialist Paul Perrone extrapolated on where such working knowledge might lead. “I’m more concerned with the prospect that these Muslim terrorists have access to formulas or precursors that would enable them to create their own WMD,” he warned.

Read more: Saddam’s WMDs: The Left’s Iraq Lies Exposed | FrontPage Magazine
 

gopher

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We've gone this innumerable times in that these are IAEA approved decommissioned dump sites. Again, for the umpteenth time it proves Bush was wrong.