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<p>ABC reported on their website blog about 20 min ago that United Nations weapons inspectors discovered six to eight vials of a dangerous nerve gas, phosgene, as they were cleaning out offices at a U.N. building in New York this morning, federal authorities tell the Blotter on ABCNews.com. The federal authorities said the office, in a U.N. building near headquarters, was being evacuated and the White House had been notified at 10 a.m. New York police and fire officials said federal authorities had not notified them of any problem at the U.N. building, as of 11 a.m. A U.N. spokesperson said a statement would be issued shortly.</p>

Nerve gas found at UN.

By Tim Ripley NEW satellite images of an Iraqi nerve gas plant show that the site has been rebuilt after being bombed by the United States, but there seems to be little sign that production of chemical weapons is under way. The site, named Fallujah I, some 38 miles north-west of Baghdad, is one of three similar facilities built in the late 1980s around the town of Habbaniyah to mass-produce elements, known as precursors, of the nerve gases used in the Iran-Iraq war and against the Kurds in 1988 and 1991. Images taken by an American company, DigitalGlobe, and published...

<p>Satellite pix show that three chemical facilities in Iraq - Fullujah I, II and III - wrecked in the 1991 Gulf War are back in business.</p> <p>August 19, 2002 -- WASHINGTON - These mysterious chemical factories northwest of Baghdad are a major reason the Bush administration thinks war with Iraq is inevitable.</p>

US intelligence analysts misunderstood intercepted Iraqi communications, believing the orders were meant to deceive UN weapons inspectors searching for chemical or biological agents, a new report says. Instead, the conversation between two Iraqi Republican Guard Corps commanders that included the order to remove reference to "nerve agents" from "wireless" communications was intended to ensure the regime was in compliance with international demands to disarm, the Foreign Affairs magazine reported in its online edition this week. That conversation was intercepted by the United States in 2002. The article was based on a recently declassified US Joint Forces Command report assessing Iraqi...

Saddam Regime Document CMPC-2003-016083 dated in 2001 contains a series of Top Secret memos that address the production of Nerve Gas Detectors which was prohibited by the United Nations resolutions concerning Iraq according to the document itself. The importance of the production of the Nerve Gas Detector is shown by the top secret letters exchange between the Presidential Office and the head of the Iraqi Military Industrialization Commission (M.I.C). This documents is yet another indication that Saddam Regime never stopped his WMD programs, and the nerve Gas Detector which some can see it a “defensive in nature” is not to...

Original Title: MAKE THE DIAGNOSIS CLASSIFIED. CONSIDER THE PATIENTS TO BE FAKING The preliminary documents concerning the mass poisoning in Chechnya have been confiscated, and physicians are compelled to choose between the Hippocratic Oath and a non-disclosure agreement.                      Throughout December there were reports of mass poisonings at schools in the Chechen region of Shelkovsk. Just before the New Year's holidays, a government commission which was created in order to 'determine the causes and liquidate the results' of the events there published its official verdict: no need to worry, there were no poisonings, but a mass psychosis due...

More than 70 people -- most of them schoolchildren, and all but a handful of them girls -- have now been affected by a mysterious ailment in an eastern district of Russia's war-torn republic of Chechnya. During the past week, residents have been struck by sudden bouts of tremors, nausea, and shortness of breath. Some doctors have reported incidents of psychotic episodes, with patients experiencing panic attacks or mania. Some regional authorities have said the illness is suggestive of nerve-gas poisoning. But toxicologists have reportedly found no evidence to substantiate the claim. RFE/RL reports on what may be behind Chechnya's...

"More than 35 people, most of them children, in the Russian republic of Chechnya have been hospitalized with illness that preliminary diagnosis indicates could be nerve-gas poisoning, officials said Tuesday. The ill include pupils, teachers and workers at a middle school in the town of Starogladovskaya, according to Vladimir Gerasin, a spokesman for the Ministry of Emergency Situations' office for southern Russia."

NEWPORT, Ind. (AP) -- Army contractors halted operations Saturday at a western Indiana complex built to destroy a deadly nerve agent after nearly 500 gallons of caustic wastewater spilled in a contained area. No workers were injured or exposed to the hydrolysate, a byproduct of the destruction of the agent, when it leaked onto the floor of a sealed area at the Newport Chemical Depot, depot spokesman Dennis Lindsey said. The facility was to be shut down until the spill was cleaned up and its cause determined, Lindsey said. The western Indiana facility destroys the Cold War-era chemical weapon VX...

U.S. military forces have discovered a smuggling ring moving copious quantities of explosives and weapons from Iraq to terrorist training camps constructed by the Saddam Hussein regime inside Syria prior to Operation Iraqi Freedom (OIF). The Pentagon also announced that the structure bombed by U.S. warplanes last week, described by many major media outlets as a wedding celebration at a private ranching operation, was actually a "dormitory-like" facility used as a "safe house" to facilitate the clandestine movement of foreign terrorists into Iraq from Syria. According to Pentagon officials, small arms, explosives, and bomb making materials are being removed from...

SCOTLAND Yard believes it has thwarted an al-Qaeda nerve gas attack aimed at ministers and MPs in the British Parliament. The plot, hatched last year, is understood to have been discovered in coded emails on computers seized from terror suspects in Britain and Pakistan. Police and MI5 later identified an al-Qaeda cell that had carried out extensive research and video-recorded reconnaissance missions in preparation for the terror attack. The encrypted emails are said to have been decoded with the assistance of an al-Qaeda "supergrass". By revealing the terrorists' code, he was also able to help MI5 and GCHQ - the...

Saddam, the ATM of Al Qaeda By Christopher S. Carson FrontPageMagazine.com | November 15, 2004 The Report of the 9/11 Commission has been digested, and the news media outlets have seized upon it as confirmation of their view that al Qaeda is a kind of purely stateless entity that never had "operational links" with rogue states like Iraq. Somehow, goes the thrust of the Report, Osama bin Laden was for years able to finance, train and supply an international terrorist corporation that had ongoing jihad operations in fifty countries - by himself, on no more than a $30 million personal...

ARIS, May 29 — Italian and German investigators have disclosed fresh information suggesting that hints of an attack involving aircraft and the United States were more widespread among European law enforcement agencies before Sept. 11 than previously suspected.The disclosures come after weeks in which the Bush administration and the Federal Bureau of Investigation, which announced a shake-up today, have come under sharp criticism that they did not pay sufficient heed to signs of Al Qaeda plots in the United States that may have alerted them to the Sept. 11 attacks.A Central Intelligence Agency spokesman said today that before Sept....

On March 16, 1988, 5,000 residents of Halabja, a Kurdish city in eastern Iraq, were killed and 10,000 injured when Saddam Hussein's army attacked with chemical weapons -- perhaps the largest-scale use of such weapons against a civilian population in modern times. That morning, Iraqi Air Force planes bombed the city with a lethal chemical cocktail of mustard gas and sarin, tabun and VX nerve agents. Two days ago, the man accused of overseeing the attack, Gen. Ali Hasan al-Majid, also known as Chemical Ali, appeared before a judicial tribunal in Baghdad. He is likely to go on trial next...

AMSTERDAM, Netherlands (AP) Prosecutors said on Tuesday they will charge a Dutch chemicals dealer as an accomplice to genocide for supplying Saddam Hussein with lethal chemicals used in the 1988 chemical attack on a Kurdish town that killed an estimated 5,000 civilians. Wim de Bruin of the national prosecutor's office said the suspect, who was arrested in Amsterdam on Monday, will face charges ''for violating the laws of war and involvement in genocide.'' Prosecutors said Frans van Anraat, a 62-year-old chemicals dealer, had been a suspect since 1989, when he was arrested in Milan, Italy, at the request of the...

A MAN suspected of helping former Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein commit war crimes and genocide by supplying him with materials for chemical weapons, has been arrested by the Netherlands authorities. Prosecutors said the 62-year-old man, identified as Frans van Anraat by Dutch television, was arrested at his Amsterdam home on Monday as he prepared to leave the Netherlands. "According to the United Nations, the Dutchman is one of the most important middlemen in Iraq’s acquisition of chemical material," Dutch prosecutors said in a statement. "The man is suspected of supplying thousands of tonnes of raw materials for chemical weapons between...

Eight workers at the Tooele Chemical Agent Disposal Facility have been medically cleared after tests showed they were not exposed to chemical agents. (Nov 12, 2004) -- STOCKTON, Utah (AP) -- A scare for eight workers at the Tooele Chemical Agent Disposal Facility in Stockton. Tests show the workers were not exposed to chemical agents. That word today from officials at the Deseret Chemical Depot. The workers were given medical evaluations for possible exposure to VX nerve agent. Those were conducted after entries into the toxic area were suspended last Tuesday with the discovery of a contaminated breathing air supply...

As the military advances closer to Baghdad, signs of Iraqi chemical preparedness are multiplying, although there is still no conclusive evidence Saddam Hussein's regime possesses weapons of mass destruction. On Friday, troops at a training facility in the western Iraqi desert came across a bottle labeled "tabun" -- a nerve gas and chemical weapon Iraq is banned from possessing. Closer to Baghdad, troops at Iraq's largest military industrial complex found nerve agent antidotes, documents describing chemical warfare and a white powder that appeared to be used for explosives. U.N. weapons inspectors went repeatedly to the vast al Qa Qaa complex...

I'd like to get some discussion going in advance of the Iraq Survey Group's final report. The topic: the finds of large numbers of drums of substances that field tested as nerve agents, but were later pronounced to be pesticides, at several Iraqi munitions dumps. There is a Frontpage article which was posted here back in April when it was new. I added a post to it's thread, but knowing that many FReepers probably do what I usually do and read the threads index to the Forum rather than the messages index, I though a new thread would be in...