Free Republic

WASHINGTON - U.S. troops have found a suspected chemical factory in Iraq and officials were trying to determine late Sunday whether it was involved in making chemical weapons, U.S. officials said. The plant is near the city of An Najaf, which U.S. troops reached Sunday on a push to Baghdad, the officials said. President Bush and other U.S. officials say ridding Saddam Hussein's regime of chemical and biological weapons is the main objective of the war. Saddam's government denies it has any chemical, biological or nuclear weapons or programs to produce them. Asked at a news conference in Qatar Sunday...

The United Nations has determined that Saddam Hussein shipped weapons of mass destruction components as well as medium-range ballistic missiles before, during and after the U.S.-led war against Iraq in 2003. The UN Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission briefed the Security Council on new findings that could help trace the whereabouts of Saddam's missile and WMD program. The briefing contained satellite photographs that demonstrated the speed with which Saddam dismantled his missile and WMD sites before and during the war. Council members were shown photographs of a ballistic missile site outside Baghdad in May 2003, and then saw a satellite...