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<p>December 5, 2002 -- U.N. weapons inspectors found mustard gas yesterday inside Iraqi artillery shells at a military complex north of Baghdad.</p> <p>The inspectors had already known the gas and shells were stored at the Muthanna military site but hadn't yet been destroyed when the previous inspection team left Iraq in 1998.</p>

The U.S. Marines who guarded the sprawling complex in northwest Iraq where Saddam Hussein’s 1980s war machine churned out some of the most deadly chemical and biological weapons known to man had a name for one especially mysterious bunker: The Dragon’s Egg.

"Many people have asked how closeSaddam Hussein is to developing a nuclear weapon. Well, we don't know exactly, and that's the problem." -George W. Bush, Cincinnati, Ohio, Oct 7, 2002 In wake of ISIS possibly acquiring and using chemical weapons in Iraq, The NYTimes' C.J. Chivers came out with a piece earlier this week that has reignited debate over the issue of Iraq WMD. Chivers' article that covers old munitions and the plight of OIF soldiers exposed to chemical weapons leakage, is not exactly new news. "Nothing found" is a lie, which much of mainstream belief has embraced due to...

What a difference a decade makes! When it was first reported in May 2004 that Saddam-era chemical weapons shells had injured U.S. troops, the editors of the New York Times dismissed that, “Finding some residual weapons that had escaped a large-scale destruction program would be no great surprise and if the chemicals had degraded, no major threat.” Now, a major New York Times report on the issue has been followed by an editorial warning of “A Deadly Legacy in Iraq”: some 5,000 chemical shells have been discovered over the years in Iraq by U.S. or U.S.-trained Iraqi forces. Many more...

New media accounts — including coverage by NRO’s Patrick Brennan — confirm what I repeatedly have written since the depths of Operation Iraqi Freedom: The late dictator Saddam Hussein did have weapons of mass death, and the United States of America was correct to invade Iraq, find these toxins, and destroy them. Also vital: padlocking this Baathist general store for militant-Islamic terrorism. As I explained on July 17, 2006: While the liberal press gently sleeps, evidence continues to mount that Hussein had WMDs, though perhaps not in quantities that would bulge warehouses. “Since 2003 Coalition forces have recovered approximately...

There’s one man, some Republicans say, who kept the public from learning about the chemical shells littered around the Iraqi battlefield. He was Bush's most important political adviser. Starting in 2004, some members of the George W. Bush administration and Republican lawmakers began to find evidence of discarded chemical weapons in Iraq. But when the information was brought up with the White House, senior adviser Karl Rove told them to ‘let these sleeping dogs lie.’ The issue of Iraq’s WMD remnant was suddenly thrust back into the fore this week, with a blockbuster New York Times report accusing the Bush...

This story is disturbing on multiple levels. It has been revealed that stockpiles of expired or degraded chemical munitions were discovered in Iraq during the initial years of the war and both American and Iraqi forces were exposed to them in more than twenty instances. This information was never revealed to the public. American troops were exposed to chemical weapons multiple times in the years following the 2003 invasion of Iraq, while the Pentagon kept their discoveries of the expired or degraded weapons secret from investigators, fellow soldiers, and military doctors, according to a published report. The New York...

The New York Times has the rather annoying problem of having to make actual facts fit their confirmation bias.  By making journalistic pretzels of Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction, they’ve backed into the fact that W.M.D.’s really did exist in Saddam’s Iraq, despite their protestations. In 2004, an NYT public apology declaredTo anyone who read the paper between September 2002 and June 2003, the impression that Saddam Hussein possessed, or was acquiring, a frightening arsenal of W.M.D. seemed unmistakable. Except, of course, it appears to have been mistaken. [emphasis mine] Ten years later, above the fold “The Secret Casualties of Iraq’s Abandoned Chemical Weapons” dances like...

The New York Times...details U.S. forces in Iraq finding thousands of chemical weapons during the Iraq war. "From 2004 to 2011...troops repeatedly encountered, and on at least six occasions were wounded by, chemical weapons remaining from years earlier in Saddam Hussein’s rule," "In all, American troops secretly reported finding roughly 5,000 chemical warheads

The United States had gone to war declaring it must destroy an active weapons of mass destruction program. Instead, American troops gradually found and ultimately suffered from the remnants of long-abandoned programs, built in close collaboration with the West. The New York Times found 17 American service members and seven Iraqi police officers who were exposed to nerve or mustard agents after 2003. American officials said that the actual tally of exposed troops was slightly higher, but that the government’s official count was classified. The secrecy fit a pattern. Since the outset of the war, the scale of the United...

The FBI said Monday that no one has been arrested after last week’s discovery of a pair of letters containing the deadly poison ricin in Spokane, but the agency remained tight-lipped about the investigation and a weekend raid at a downtown apartment building. … The letters were postmarked last Tuesday in Spokane and addressed to the downtown post office and the adjacent federal building. They were intercepted by the Postal Service, and no one was injured. … Witnesses have said a man was escorted from the building by law enforcement officers Saturday morning. Sandalo Dietrich declined to say if anyone...

(CNN) -- A Texas actress in a troubled marriage was arrested and charged Friday in connection with ricin-tainted letters that were mailed last month to President Barack Obama and New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, authorities said. Shannon Richardson, 35, also known as Shannon Rogers and Shannon Guess, initially told the FBI that her husband, Nathaniel, sent the ricin-laced letters, but a polygraph exam found her to be "deceptive" on the matter, court papers said. Investigators found that her computer storage devices contained the text of threatening letters sent to the president, but the couple's computer records show her husband...

The FBI is looking for a man who lives in the San Francisco apartment where agents found a large stash of what appears to be the deadly poison ricin. On Saturday, FBI agents searched the apartment, which belongs to Ryan Chamberlain, according to KGO, an ABC affiliate. The FBI said Chamberlain could be armed and dangerous. The apartment search was expected to resume Sunday. Chamberlain owns a Nissan that reportedly could be rigged with explosives. The FBI did not evacuate apartments during the search, and FBI spokeswoman Alice Heller said there was “no threat to public safety.” She said agents...

<p>Disturbing new photos of ethnic Kurds killed by Islamic State fighters are stoking fears the terrorist army may be using chemical weapons seized from Saddam Hussein’s old arsenals, according to a Middle East watchdog.</p> <p>The pictures, obtained by the Middle East Review of International Affairs (MERIA), show the bodies of Syrian Kurds who appear to have been gassed by ISIS in the besieged Kobani region this July. That fighting came just one month after Islamic State forces surged through the once-notorious Muthanna compound in Iraq, the massive base where Hussein began producing chemical weapons in the 1980s, which he used to kill thousands of Kurds in Halabja in northern Iraq in 1988.</p>

A quick update on the largely forgotten half of President Obama’s shambolic Syria policy. You’ll recall, of course, the blown chemical weapons “red line” and the subsequent, humiliating Putin/Assad plan that accidentally became US policy due after John Kerry blundered into it. Kerry has since admitted that the entire proposition has collapsed, forcing the White House to publicly disagree with its own Secretary of State. Nevertheless, a loyal band of administration lackeys triumphantly cheered news of Syria’s alleged disarmament when it broke over the summer, after several missed deadlines. ‘No Drama Obama’ had done it again, they crowed, achieving...

ISIS is feared to be readying crude chemical weapons to use against civilians if it comes under military pressure to dislodge from territory it holds in Iraq, according to a leading British expert. “I think it is very likely ISIS will use chemical weapons, especially if things start going badly for it,” said Hamish de Bretton-Gordon, a former British colonel who has helped to provide proof that chlorine gas was used by Bashar al-Assad in Syria. “ISIS has shown intent by using chlorine a number of times on Iraqi army units already,” he told Rudaw. He is currently looking into...

IS has used chlorine gas against Iraqi soldiers News / World IS Militants Kill 300 Iraqi Soldiers with Chlorine Gas 22.09.2014 Shwan BarzinjiBasNews, Erbil Iraqi Member of Parliament Ali al-Bredi has claimed that Islamic State (IS) militants are using Chlorine gas against Iraqi soldiers in Fallujah. In a press conference on Monday, al-Bredi revealed that IS have killed 300 Iraqi soldiers with chlorine gas. He said that the militants deployed the gas in the Siqiliya area located of northern Fallujah, a city in Anbar province, about 70 km from the capital of Iraq, Baghdad. “Responsibility for this lies with...

Three hundred Iraqi soldiers died in a chlorine gas attack carried out by the self-proclaimed Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS) in the Iraqi city of Fallujah, said Ali al-Budairi, an Iraqi MP from the Shia-dominated National Iraqi alliance in the Iraqi Parliament on Monday.It is unclear when the attacks took place. ISIS's use of chlorine gas in attacks isn't new. There are reports that the ISIS militants used chlorine-war gas before.Speaking at a press conference in the Iraqi Parliament on Monday, Ali al-Budairi said: "ISIS killed 300 out of 400 soldiers they besieged in Saqlawiya district of northern...

On Monday several Members of Parliament from Diwaniyah Province confirmed that ISIS killed over 300 soldiers using chlorine gas for the first time in Saqlawiyah, north of Fallujah.Islamic Dawa party MP Ali al-Badri said, at a press conference at the parliament building in the presence of a number of deputies of Diwaniyah province and attended by IraqiNews.com that “the terrorist organization ISIS used chlorine gas for the first time in the region of Saqlawiyah after trapping more than 400 troops, resulting in the deaths of many of them due to suffocation while the terrorist gangs detonated car bombs within the...

At least 14 ISIS fighters were killed while filling a chemical warhead near Baghdad. The Business Standard reported, via Rantburg: At least 14 members of the Islamic State (IS) terrorist group were killed Tuesday near Baghdad when a rocket whose warhead they were filling with chlorine gas exploded. Iraqi security officials said seven more IS militants were injured in the incident, which occurred near the town of al-Dhuluiya, about 90 km north of Baghdad. Al-Dhuluiya was also where four members of the Iraqi security forces and Shiite militiamen suffered symptoms of asphyxiation after inhaling chlorine gas released by two improvised...