I thought the unwashed, intelligent hippies said that Hussein (No, the other one) didn’t have any chemical weapons.
bumpity bump!
I guess it was safer to keep the old stuff where it was. This is the stuff from the late 80’sand early 90’s
and IIRC the UN Inspectors, before they got kicked out di report the stuff posed no danger as it was
The REAL danger is how much and how easy it is for ISIA to take control of things
“Sunni extremists in Iraq have occupied what was once Saddam Hussein’s premier chemical-weapons production facility, a complex that still contains a stockpile of old weapons, State Department and other U.S. government officials said.”
Wait, what? I thought that was all a ChimpyMcHitler lie!
Obama has been Commande in Chief for 5 years and 5 months and all that time neglected to secure that chemical weapons facility or remove components?
Disgrace.
Where’s a drone when you need one?
Is the Wall Street Journal really writing that after a war 10 years ago that there are materials -- now old -- that were 10 years younger then?
Then there's this from the UK Telgraph:
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.
“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,” he told the Telegraph. “We have seen that Isis has used chemicals in explosions in Iraq before and has carried out experiments in Syria.”
What the heck is that all about? I thought there were no WMDs.
And then there's this by the UK Telegraph:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/middleeast/iraq/10913275/Isis-storms-Saddam-era-chemical-weapons-complex-in-Iraq.html
Isis storms Saddam-era chemical weapons complex in Iraq
Facility containing disused stores of sarin and mustard gas overrun by jihadist group
Tagged and numbered remnants of Iraq's chemical weapons program at the Muthanna State Establishment
Tagged and numbered remnants of Iraq's chemical weapons program at the Muthanna State Establishment in 2002 Photo: GETTY IMAGES
By Damien McElroy
7:58PM BST 19 Jun 2014
Comments5 Comments
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 pot
entially deadly poisons including mustard gas and sarin. Isis invaded the al-Muthanna mega-facility 60 miles north of Baghdad in a rapid takeover that the US government said was a matter of concern.
The facility was notorious in the 1980s and 1990s as the locus of Saddam’s industrial scale efforts to develop a chemical weapons development programme.
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, said that al-Muthanna has large stores of weaponized and bulk mustard gas and sarin, most of which has been put beyond ready use in concrete stores.
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“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,” he told the Telegraph. “We have seen that Isis has used chemicals in explosions in Iraq before and has carried out experiments in Syria.”
US officials revealed that the group had occupied the sprawling site which has two bunkers encased in a concrete seal. Much of the sarin is believed to be redundant.
“We remain concerned about the seizure of any military site by the [Isis],” Jen Psaki, the State Department spokeswoman, said. “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.”
During its peak in the late 1980s to early 1990s, Iraq produced bunkers full of chemical munitions.
A CIA report on the facility said that 150 tons of mustard were produced each year at the peak from 1983 and pilot-scale production of Sarin began in 1984.
Its most recent description of al-Muthanna in 2007 paints a disturbing picture of chemicals strewn throughout the area.
“Two wars, sanctions and UN oversight reduced Iraqi’s premier production facility to a stockpile of old damaged and contaminated chemical munitions (sealed in bunkers), a wasteland full of destroyed chemical munitions, razed structures, and unusable war-ravaged facilities,” it said.
“Some of the bunkers contained large quantities of unfilled chemical munitions, conventional munitions, one-ton shipping containers, old disabled production equipment and other hazardous industrial chemicals.”
Britain has previously acknowledgeded that the nature of the material contained in the two bunkers would make the destruction process difficult and technically challenging.
Under an agreement signed in Baghdad in July 2012, experts from the MOD’s Defence Science and Technology Laboratory were due to provide training to Iraqi personnel in order to help them to dispose of the chemical munitions and agents.
Saddam Hussein used chemical weapons during the Iran – Iraq War (1980 to 1988) and against the Kurds in Halabja in 1988.
One US official told the Wall Street Journal yesterday that Isis fighters could be contaminated by the chemicals at the site.
“The only people who would likely be harmed by these chemical materials would be the people who tried to use or move them,” the military officer said.
For the last time: SADDAM DID NOT HAVE ANY WMDS!
MSNBC told me so!
I heard Rush talking about this today.
Can anyone explain to me how we managed to leave that stuff just lying around during all the time we were there?
That is what to me is astounding and I’m not really impressed by what Rush was saying - that this proves the WMD argument was true.
When I did a Google search for articles about this story when it first broke, could not find them if you searched for the WMD abbreviation. Apparently it is being censored and dropped from the stories. You must search for chemical weapons not WMD. Funny.
Someone please get this report to Megyn Kelly, ASAP!!
Paging Dick Cheney...please pick up the FoxNews courtesy phone...
obama’s brothers in arms. he supports sunnis over shites though that is like saying horse crap smells better than cow crap.
Has there been one republican point out that Hussein supposedly didn’t have these weapons of mass destruction?
Didn’t anyone ever hear of at least concreting the cache so it could never be accessed? DUH!!! Morons! If you can’t burn or blow it up then it make it inaccessible and unusable by any means. It’s not rocket science.
Everyone knows that there were never any WMDs in Iraq.
We have been told that a billion trillion times during GW’s terms and a zillion billion trillion times during Herr Obozo, our Sunni WonDoer potus’s rule.