Free Republic

Paul Pillar Speaks, Again The latest CIA attack on the Bush administration is nothing new. by Stephen F. Hayes 02/10/2006 4:15:00 PM IN A BREATHLESS front-page, above-the-fold article in today's Washington Post, Walter Pincus reports that a former senior CIA official named Paul Pillar accuses the Bush administration of "misusing" intelligence to take the country to war in Iraq. According to the Post account, Pillar uses a forthcoming article in Foreign Affairs to claim that the Bush administration "politicized" the intelligence on Iraq. Bush administration policymakers did this subtly, Pillar says, by repeatedly asking the CIA questions about Iraq, its...

I asked me that question yesterday after listening to the speech of Hezbollah leader Nasrallah. A few summaries: "Israel doesn't know our capabilities on every level," Nasrallah said. "The Zionist enemy has not succeeded in infiltrating our group,"(...) "The enemy doesn't know our capabilities or what we have."(...) "(...)If you think Hizbullah cannot stand firm in this confrontation, then your government and army are deceiving you,"(...) We know, that Syria and Iran equipped Hezbollah with all kinds of military things. Thousands of rockets, even longer-range rockets as we know now, and other stuff. The Haifa rocket that killed 8 people...

U.S. military forces have discovered a smuggling ring moving copious quantities of explosives and weapons from Iraq to terrorist training camps constructed by the Saddam Hussein regime inside Syria prior to Operation Iraqi Freedom (OIF). The Pentagon also announced that the structure bombed by U.S. warplanes last week, described by many major media outlets as a wedding celebration at a private ranching operation, was actually a "dormitory-like" facility used as a "safe house" to facilitate the clandestine movement of foreign terrorists into Iraq from Syria. According to Pentagon officials, small arms, explosives, and bomb making materials are being removed from...

Final preparations are under way at the Newport Chemical Disposal Facility, where workers are just days away from starting the destruction of VX nerve agent. Col. Jesse Barber, Chemical Materials Agency's project manager of Alternative and Approaches, goes over his checklist every day in anticipation of startup, he said. The 1,269 tons of the deadly nerve agent VX has been stored at the Newport Chemical Depot since the 1960s. A drop of VX the size of a BB can be lethal, the Army has said. Destruction of this nerve-agent stockpile will remove the risk of a terrorist target and the...

Army gives OK to VX destruction in NewportAction will be 'one step closer' to destroying lethal nerve agentBy Patricia L. Pastore/Tribune-Star Army officials gave the nod Monday to begin destruction of VX nerve agent this spring and to store the byproduct, hydrolysate, on-site at Newport, said Jeff Brubaker, government site project manager, on Tuesday. The plan is identical to one citizens have proposed to Army officials for more than three years: destroy the VX and store the hydrolysate there until a decision is made on how to treat and dispose of the resulting waste. One drop of VX the size...

Saddam, the ATM of Al Qaeda By Christopher S. Carson FrontPageMagazine.com | November 15, 2004 The Report of the 9/11 Commission has been digested, and the news media outlets have seized upon it as confirmation of their view that al Qaeda is a kind of purely stateless entity that never had "operational links" with rogue states like Iraq. Somehow, goes the thrust of the Report, Osama bin Laden was for years able to finance, train and supply an international terrorist corporation that had ongoing jihad operations in fifty countries - by himself, on no more than a $30 million personal...

The hunt for WMD's in Iraq is finally over, and basically we didn't find anything. Yes, the Poles found a bunch of old binary shells filled with Sarin, but I can't believe that was all that Saddam had. Saddam was a ruthless, paranoid bastard who didn't make threats he couldn't back up. Even our buddy the Swedish inspector Hans Blix wrote a memo just before the start of the war about the status of 10,000 liters of anthrax. Nancy Pelosi, the ranking communist from Northern California quipped "(Bush) needs to explain to the American people why he was so wrong,...

On March 16, 1988, 5,000 residents of Halabja, a Kurdish city in eastern Iraq, were killed and 10,000 injured when Saddam Hussein's army attacked with chemical weapons -- perhaps the largest-scale use of such weapons against a civilian population in modern times. That morning, Iraqi Air Force planes bombed the city with a lethal chemical cocktail of mustard gas and sarin, tabun and VX nerve agents. Two days ago, the man accused of overseeing the attack, Gen. Ali Hasan al-Majid, also known as Chemical Ali, appeared before a judicial tribunal in Baghdad. He is likely to go on trial next...

Well, it appears that Messrs. Clinton and Bush have [much] in common.... Both have warned -- Mr. Clinton first, of course -- that the nexus between rogue states like Iraq and terrorists like al Qaeda poses the greatest threat to America. On this point, in fact, Mr. Clinton has much more in common with Mr. Bush than he does with John Kerry. According to 9/11 Commission co-chairman Thomas Kean, Mr. Clinton believed with "absolute certainty" that Iraq provided al Qaeda with weapons of mass destruction expertise and technology in the 1990s. He believed it as president when he ordered the...

NEWPORT, Ind. (AP) - In a cavernous, pipe-filled structure known simply as the Utility Building, Army contractors are getting ready to destroy a Cold War-era concoction so lethal it could kill untold millions. After years of controversy, workers will begin chemically neutralizing 1,269 tons of the ultra-deadly nerve agent VX this summer as part of a plan to eliminate the nation’s chemical weapons stockpile. Residents near the Newport Chemical Depot are ready to see the VX go. So are activists who keep tabs on the nation’s cache of weapons of mass destruction. "One drop the size of George Washington’s eye...

WABC's radio's Bachelor & John Loftis (sp) reporting Syria gave Iraq's chemical WMD to AlQaeda. Captured trucks in Jordan with chemicals with Vx attack would have killed 20,000.

Sixteen years ago today, 5,000 innocent Iraqi civilians perished under a barrage of mustard gas; nerve agents sarin, tabun and VX; and possibly cyanide. The brutal attack, launched by their own government, earned Saddam Hussein the dubious distinction of becoming the first world leader in modern times to have used chemical weapons on his own people. The victims of the attack were residents of Halabja, 150 miles northeast of Baghdad and just south of the Iranian border. Three-quarters of them were women and children. The chemical attacks on what has come to be known as "Bloody Friday" were the most...

AUM founder Asahara found guilty of all 13 charges TOKYO, Feb. 27, Kyodo - (EDS: UPDATING WITH INCLUSION OF 1995 SARIN GAS ATTACK, LAWYERS' STATEMENT) Shoko Asahara, the founder of the AUM Shinrikyo cult, is guilty of all 13 charges against him, including the 1995 sarin gassing on the Tokyo subway system, the Tokyo District Court ruled Friday. The guilty verdicts handed down against the 48-year-old guru boost the likelihood of a death penalty since any one of the cases carries a death penalty. Asahara, whose real name is Chizuo Matsumoto, faced charges in 13 criminal cases that resulted...

Baghdad leaders reveal that coup plot duped MI6 Julie Flint explains how rumours of Saddam's overthrow caused British intelligence to miss vital information about Iraq's weapons programme British intelligence took its eyes off Saddam Hussein's weapons programmes because it had been duped into believing a military coup would leave Sunni Muslims in power in Iraq. Sources in the country say what they missed was a push to convert chemical and biological organisms into dry agents that could be hidden until pressure on the regime was lifted. 'From the second half of 2000, the focus of the British was not on...

After 9/11, the testing to detect contaminants in water supplies abruptly moved from an arcane laboratory exercise to a front-burner item in the forefront of the rapidly developing homeland security market. One of the biggest newsmakers in the emerging marketplace may be a tiny organism called daphnia. The tiny water fleas–typically about 3 mm long–are commonly used as bioindicators. Now, Aqua Survey Inc. is unveiling a detection kit that uses daphnia to quickly determine whether ricin, cyanide, VX, botulinium toxin and other toxins are present in a municipal water supply. The Flemington, N.J.-based firm presented slides and film of daphnia...

<p>The Army said it will delay destruction of a deadly nerve agent at the Newport Chemical Depot until early 2004 because the plant doesn't yet meet environmental standards or have a sprinkler system.</p> <p>A federal lawsuit in Ohio, announced last month, also might add to the delay of a process ordered by international treaty and shadowed by terrorism.</p>

<p>The operation at an Army depot is beginning slowly and will take seven years to destroy the GB, VX and mustard gas and the rockets that carry them, said Army spokesman Mike Abrams.</p> <p>The burn had been scheduled to begin Wednesday, but the Army agreed to delay until Friday's hearing on the request by the Chemical Weapons Working Group -- opponents of the burn -- for a temporary restraining order.</p>

A coalition of environmentalists and citizens groups asked a U.S. court on Monday to issue a last-minute injunction barring the military from destroying hundreds of Cold War-era chemical weapons at an incinerator in Alabama. The U.S. Army, complying with an international treaty, is expected to begin burning the first of its M-55 rockets containing the deadly nerve agent sarin on Wednesday at its $1 billion chemical weapons disposal facility in Anniston. In a motion filed in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, the Sierra Club environmental group and other opponents of the plan argued that large amounts...

<p>WASHINGTON (CNN) -- A senior U.S. intelligence official told CNN on Monday that a soil sample from the Sudanese pharmaceutical factory destroyed last week by U.S. missiles has tested positive for a chemical that is "one step away" from deadly VX nerve gas.</p>

www.4ranters.comIt seems the anti-Bush crowd has found a new way to attempt to discredit Bush and the war in Iraq. This time, it's the missing WMDs. After the swift liberation of Iraq and the worries of the peaceniks proven wrong, one would figure the anti-war crowd would finally concede. Somehow, the fact that WMDs haven't been found - yet - is supposed to prove the war as unjustified, and make Bush and Tony Blair liars. First the protestors predicted a messy quagmire of a war where thousands of lives would be lost. Massive casualties of both Iraqi civilians and American...