Posted on 06/20/2014 3:02:57 PM PDT by tpanther
The Iraq War is supposed to be “ended,” or so the administration claimed, but the heavily armed “terrorist army” ISIS (Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham) is rampaging through Iraq and has taken control of a chemical weapons complex. The Telegraph reports:
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.
.
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.
(Excerpt) Read more at ijreview.com ...
Information is more thorough on the facility history with regard in particular to chemical artillery rounds (not dissimilar to what Assad has used) here
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Ipankonin/Duelfer_Chemical_Weapons_quotes
It does seem to be a lack of any foresight by the American military command that this facility was not dealt with, but bear in mind.
1) The facility was obviously so damaged and unstable that Saddam had decommissioned it himself. It was not apparent that the facility was a threat.
2) Nobody expected what would come later with ISIS. People were anticipating a residual force after the hard-fought gains in Iraq, a la South Korea. With a then-stable government in place, there just wasn’t a credible threat at the time.
3) I would suspect (though I have no evidence) that the facility was brought to al-Malaki’s attention. At the end of the day, a decommissioned and dangerous chemical facility is his problem, and people probably suspected him to deal with it in the interest of public safety. Obviously this didn’t happen.
With all that being said, I am sensing that this was just sloppy. Nobody wanted to do a full run-down on the complex, and with all the madness that occurred as the war wound down, people just wanted to forget about it, resign it to history as just another relic of a by-gone decade.
The most important thing to note is that if the inspection by ISG was incomplete due to the unstable nature of the facility, then the intelligence on what was inside is based off of the UNSCOM report written during the 1980s. We may not have adequate intelligence on anything manufactured between that report and Desert Storm.
There were claims that some Russian eyewitnesses had affirmed that an airlift and truck convoys had moved a lot of stuff to Syria before the Marines showed up.
Also, don't forget the biological research: Dr. Death's research complex, which had been video'd intact in February before the invasion, was revisited by the same PBS TV team after the invasion and found stripped of its files, equipment, storage, everything.
Well Fox at least covers what all the lame stream media ignores. They enjoy being a thorn in their side. ALBEIT they can be quite slow. Maybe that’s it, perhaps we’ll see it just the same as soon as someone gets wind of it...but right now there’s so many zerrhoid scandals, where do they begin each day, ya know?
Watch NBC nightly news sometime, I do just to keep tabs of the loons and their leading story tonight was some mudslides in Minnesota.
Let me get this straight. The WMD’s that got us into Iraq in the first place, but weren’t there, are now the WMD’s that are going to get us involved again. Where’s Rod Sterling?
I always felt like they went to Syria, some perhaps poured into the Tigris and/or Euphrates...others hidden all over the country, but the thing that just kills me, is people wantonly ignore the fact that the SOB USED WMDs on kurds...we even see the evidence from time to time, poor dead kids gassed to death in the streets...so please PLEASE someone show me the evidence sodamn insane turned over a new leaf and quit making them, quit using them, and didn’t pursue making them, including nukes (remember when Israel took out their nuke facility, what back in ‘86?)
How many times could trucks have potentially hauled WMDs back and forth over the border with Syria? Or even carts hauled by mules?
Why do people give that SOB the benefit of the doubt, I’ll never ever know!
We KNOW WMDs were there, he USED them for God’s sakes! Work from that premise and prove they were ALL removed, destroyed...whatever...it’s not sane people’s burden to prove they existed when for heaven’s sakes they were USED ON PEOPLE...it’s insane people’s burden to prove they don’t exist based solely on insane’s compliance and cooperation in destroying them!
And I trust the UN’s capability of proving they were destroyed just about as much as I trust sodamn insane...ZERO!
Oh, and remember the idiot breaking what 18 UN resolutions? Shooting at our airmen patrolling the no-fly zone? Or threatening to shoot them...
Insane and sons were terrorists that repeatedly threatened America and the world with WM. He battled or invaded every single neighbor but Syria.
The spineless Pubbies of course acquiesced. Many things to be pi$$3d off about the Bush administration and this move is in my top five.
Obamma moved them back to give to Isis.
WTF?
We’ve been there enough years and no one thought to crow about it and then destroy them?
But we supposedly had control of this facility for some number of years.
Are we to believe that we knew they were there all this time and did nothing and not a peep about it leaked out to the media?
How could they move them back there (from wherever) when ISIS has only just overrun the facility?
No, Fox news is reporting it and saying over and over that there were no poisons there, it was an “old” factory and it could conceivably be started up again but the insurgents are too stupid to know how but they could get the old scientists to do so, blah blah blah.
As yourself I too sense a sloppiness. Unacceptable IMO, but here we are facing a repeat performance due that sloppiness I believe we can attribute to the deliberate choreographed hinderance employed by the Leftist Democrats at the time, and the currently Leftist Democrat/Obama factor.
Thanks for your response.
It seems to me that a well placed drone might kill 2 birds with one stone.
News to me, I watch Fox all the time and have seen no such thing. Got a link?
https://www.cia.gov/library/reports/general-reports-1/iraq_wmd_2004/chap5_annxB.html
You might all want to check out this CIA report on the place.
So the Pentagon lied in 2008 about Canada secretly purchasing Iraq's supply of yellow cake uranium and Jack Wilson was the epitomy of truth when he wrote the Op-Ed article claiming that Hussein never obtained yellow cake uranium from Niger, that launched a 3 year investigation into who in the Bush administration outed his dumbass wife as allegedly being a "covert" CIA agent........
OK, bro, I got it........
Syria's Chemical Weapons Came From Saddam's Iraq
Pentagon announces 500 tons of Uranium shipped from Iraq to Canada
I would not put it past zerrhoid to destroy any evidence. I also don’t trust our media to inform.
right?
Bump
Thanks for the mention. It was tough to keep up on some aspects and I either missed this or had forgotten about it.
Lorianne, I’m not sure. Is it in the same lab? If so, you make a good point. If it’s buried somewhere different, then I could have been hidden.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.