The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #86221   Message #1601893
Posted By: GUEST,Geoduck
10-Nov-05 - 09:07 PM
Thread Name: BS: WMDs WERE found in Iraq!
Subject: RE: BS: WMDs WERE found in Iraq!
From the book:

In a secret operation on June 23, 2004, U.S. forces seized 1.77 metric tons of enriched uranium—the kind used to make fuel for atomic bombs—in a nuclear facility in Iraq, according to BBC News. The BBC has been consistently critical of Bush and the Iraq war. U.S. Department of Energy experts also removed 1,000 radioactive materials in "powdered form, which is easily dispersed," said Bryan Wilkes, an Energy Department spokesman. The material would have been ideal for a radioactive dirty bomb. Then energy secretary Spencer Abraham hailed the operation as "a major achievement." Polish general Marek Dukaczewski, Poland's military intelligence chief, revealed that troops in the Polish-patrolled sector of Iraq had received tips from Iraqis that chemical weapons were sold to terrorists on the black market. The weapons had been buried to avoid detection, the general told the BBC. Polish military officials bought seventeen chemical-weapons warheads from Iraqis for $5,000 each to keep them from Iraq's so-called insurgents. "An attack with such weapons would be hard to imagine," the general said. "All of our activity was accelerated at appropriating these warheads." Tests confirmed that some of the warheads contained cyclosarin, a nerve agent five times more powerful than sarin. These chemical weapons were supposed to have been completely destroyed during the 1991–1998 UN inspector regime. Clearly, some WMD survived.
U.S. soldiers stormed into a warehouse in Mosul, Iraq, on August 8, 2005, and were surprised to find 1,500 gallons of chemical agents. It was the largest chemical weapons lab found in Iraq. The intelligence community remains divided over the origin of those chemical weapons (either from inside Iraq or outside) and whether they were made during Saddam's regime or after.

When a roadside bomb exploded near a U.S. convoy on May 17, 2004, it was found to contain the nerve agent sarin. Army Brigadier General Mark Kimmitt told reporters that an "improvised explosive" was rigged to a 155 mm artillery shell that contained sarin. The shell was a "binary chemical projectile," in which the two ingredients that produce
sarin are separated by a propeller blade that spins while the shell is in flight, mixing the deadly gas to full potency. Since the chemical weapons shell was used as a bomb, and not fired from the barrel of an artillery piece, the internal rotor did not spin and the deadly agent was not widely dispersed. As a result, Kimmitt explained, only traces of sarin were produced and released. The soldiers were briefly hospitalized and decontaminated. Again, all such chemical weapons warheads were supposed to be destroyed in 1991—yet Saddam's WMD still threaten the lives of American troops to this day.

The Iraq Survey Group, led by David Kay and charged with finding WMD after the war, discovered a projectile loaded with mustard gas attached to a roadside bomb in May 2004. Fortunately, the mustard gas was "stored improperly" and was "ineffective." The mustard-gas shell is believed to be part of the eighty tons of such gas still unaccounted for.