Free Republic

Iraq uncovers al-Qaeda 'chemical weapons plot' The authorities in Iraq say they have uncovered an al-Qaeda plot to use chemical weapons, as well as to smuggle them to Europe and North America. Defence ministry spokesman Mohammed al-Askari said five men had been arrested after military intelligence monitored their activities for three months. Three workshops for manufacturing the chemical agents, including sarin and mustard gas, were uncovered, he added. Remote-controlled toy planes were also seized at the workshops. Mr Askari said they were to have been used to release the chemical agents over the target from a "safe" distance of 1.5km...

BAGHDAD, July 21 (UPI) -- Iraqi security reportedly discovered three missiles carrying nuclear heads concealed in a concrete trench northwest of Baghdad, official sources said Wednesday. The official daily al-Sabah quoted the sources as saying the missiles were discovered in trenches near the city of Tikrit, the hometown of ousted Iraqi President Saddam Hussein. "The three missiles were discovered by chance when the Iraqi security forces captured former Baath party official Khoder al-Douri who revealed during interrogation the location of the missiles saying they carried nuclear heads," the sources said. They pointed out that the missiles were actually discovered in...

SOUTH OF KARBALA, Iraq — Four soldiers from the 2nd brigade of the 101st Airborne Division, with red sores on their faces and hands, were sent by ambulance to a rear MASH unit Tuesday. They were told they would be examined for possible contact with nerve or blistering agents. Once at the 30th medical brigade's mobile hospital at the 101st's headquarters south of Karbala, the soldiers were isolated from other troops and photographed. A doctor at the MASH, Maj. David Wolken, interviewed each soldier and measured his pulse and heart rate in a tent with a dirt floor. One soldier...

Well, here’s some lovely news emerging from the new Iraq. 17.09 Chemical weapons produced at the Al Muthanna facility, which Isis today seized, are believed to have included mustard gas, Sarin, Tabun, and VX. Here is the CIA’s file on the complex. QuoteStockpiles of chemical munitions are still stored there. The most dangerous ones have been declared to the UN and are sealed in bunkers. Although declared, the bunkers contents have yet to be confirmed. These areas of the compound pose a hazard to civilians and potential blackmarketers. Numerous bunkers, including eleven cruciform shaped bunkers were exploited. Some of the...

FAS | Nuke | Guide | Iraq | CW |||| Index | Search | Join FAS Chemical Weapons Programs Iraq started research into the production of chemical weapons agents in the 1970s and started batch production of agents in the early 1980s. At that stage, production was heavily reliant on the import of precursor chemicals from foreign suppliers. In 1982, early in the Iran-Iraq War, the Iraqis used riot control agents to repel Iranian attacks. They progressed to the use of CW agents in mid-1983 with mustard, and in March 1984 with tabun (the first use ever of a nerve...

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.

It’s a confirmation of reports in June that ISIS had taken control of a site where some of Saddam’s WMD arsenal remained. Iraq has informed the United Nations that the Islamic State extremist group has taken control of a vast former chemical weapons facility northwest of Baghdad where 2,500 chemical rockets filled with the deadly nerve agent sarin or their remnants were stored along with other chemical warfare agents. Iraq’s U.N. Ambassador Mohamed Ali Alhakim said in a letter to U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon circulated Tuesday that “terrorist” groups entered the Muthanna site June 11 and seized weapons and equipment...

With all eyes firmly focused on what really matters (the oil refineries), The Telegraph reports that ISIS has over-run a Saddam Hussein-era chemical weapons (CW) complex. The al-Muhanna 'mega-facility', about 60 miles south of Baghdad, gives the jihadists access to disused stores of hundreds of tonnes of potentially deadly poisons including mustard gas and sarin. The US state department is 'concerned' but "do not believe that the complex contains CW materials of military value." However, as a former commander of Britain's chemical weapons regiment warned, "we have seen that ISIS has used chemicals in explosions in Iraq before and has...

Barack Obama did not tell the whole story this autumn when he tried to make the case that Bashar al-Assad was responsible for the chemical weapons attack near Damascus on 21 August. In some instances, he omitted important intelligence, and in others he presented assumptions as facts. Most significant, he failed to acknowledge something known to the US intelligence community: that the Syrian army is not the only party in the country’s civil war with access to sarin, the nerve agent that a UN study concluded – without assessing responsibility – had been used in the rocket attack. In the...

Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Seymour Hersh has dropped yet another bombshell allegation: President Obama wasn't honest with the American people when he blamed Syrian President Bashar al-Assad for a sarin-gas attack in that killed hundreds of civilians...

On youtube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bc39Z84uLqI I don't know any more about this one than what you see, but it bears watching. The name attached is Vaclav Hrdina.

Vladimir Putin (5'7", allegedly), let’s review: His first term as President of Russia coincided with George W. Bush’s stolen American Presidency. I hate this American President, his stick is much bigger than mine From 2000-2008 Putin tried, more or less, to make nice with America and the West. Accordingly, he confined most of his inner-machismo to his big game hunts; and dealing with internal enemies. Ask Litvinenko: Is polonium a chemical weapon? Then, when GWB’s second term was over, he gave Dmitry Medvedev (5'4") In Russia, the difference between 5'7" and 5'4" is what they say it is. a “short”...

Might moral theology, in the form of the venerable just-war tradition of moral reasoning, point a path beyond the fantastic mess that is American policy toward an imploding Syria — a fiasco created by the Obama administration’s dangerous combination of ideological besottedness, fecklessness, and mind-boggling incompetence? The question is not as odd as it may seem at first blush. For the better part of 1,500 years, the just-war tradition — initially developed by such sophisticated thinkers as Augustine and Thomas Aquinas — has provided a framework for collaborative deliberation about ordering various means (armed force and other instruments of political...

WASHINGTON — President Obama, to his supporters, is a deliberative leader whose willingness to recalibrate his response to Syria’s use of chemical weapons potentially helped avert military strikes and further US involvement in a civil war half a world away. But to his critics, Obama is like a character in a Shakespearean comedy, where the hapless protagonist succeeds despite himself. It was, after all, only after Secretary of State John F. Kerry made an offhand comment last Monday morning in London — and Russian leaders seized on it — that renewed diplomatic discussions began. Now those discussions have led to...

CNN´s "State of the Union" host Candy Crowley asked House Intelligence Committee Chairman Mike Rogers whether it makes any difference that Vladimir Putin and Russia got the upper hand over the U.S. in the deal struck on Syria´s chemical weapons.

President Barack Obama praised an agreement reached Saturday between the U.S. and Russia, saying it offers a chance to destroy Syria's huge stockpile of chemical weapons and promises to end the threat the weapons pose to the region and the world as well as the Syrian people. Obama said in a statement Saturday that the international community expects Syria to "live up to its public commitments" to hand over its chemical weapons stockpile. Warning that the U.S. "remains prepared to act" if Syria falls short, he also cautions that more work remains even after the progress the deal represents. ~~snip...

[The Clown] declared that the United States is still prepared to act militarily to stop Iran from developing nuclear weapons despite the decision to pursue a diplomatic deal and not strike Syria over its alleged use of chemical weapons. He also acknowledged that his approach to the Syria crisis has been uneven, but defended it... Obama spoke in an interview broadcast Sunday on ABC’s “This Week With George Stephanopoulos,” taped Friday before the United States and Russia agreed on a plan to bring Syrian chemical weapons under international control in order to avoid military strikes.

(CNN) -- A Syrian minister declared "victory" for his country on Sunday, thanking Russia for orchestrating a chemical weapons deal to avert U.S. military action, Russia's state-run news agency RIA Novosti reported. "We welcome these agreements. On the one hand, they will help Syrians come out of the crisis, and on the other hand, they prevented the war against Syria by having removed a pretext for those who wanted to unleash it," National Reconciliation Minister Ali Haidar was quoted as saying. He called the deal an achievement of Russian diplomacy, and "a victory for Syria won thanks to our Russian...

A top House Democrat and Republican differed Sunday about how the United States' effort to solve the Syria crisis swerved from a threat of military force to a possible diplomatic solution, but they agreed that Russian President Vladimir Putin is now leading the effort. Rep. Chris Van Hollen, D-Md., argued that a potential diplomatic solution couldn’t have been possible without President Obama first saying the U.S. would take military action against Syrian President Bashar Assad for an Aug. 21 chemical weapons attack that killed nearly 1,500 of his own people. “We wouldn’t be at this point if not for the...

CNN’s State of the Union host Candy Crowley asked Rep. Mike Rogers (R., Mich.) if the U.S. really cared whether Russia had the diplomatic edge in the deal over Syrian chemical weapons, which provides a framework for the destruction or removal of them over the next year. Rogers explained the deal was a “Russian plan for Russian interests” before Crowley cut over him with her question Sunday. Rogers replied that it was serious because the U.S. had given away the credibility of its military force by allowing Russia to take the lead in the region. “The Syria plan has been...