Free Republic

Florida Sen. Marco Rubio told Fox News he’s “gravely concerned” about Iran’s role in helping Syria develop its chemical warfare program that ended up killing dozens of people weeks ago. Rubio, a Republican, said he was troubled by reports that both Iran and Russia were complicit in Bashar Assad’s chemical weapons program. While the Trump administration accused Moscow of covering up the Syrian regime's chemical weapons attack, the U.S government has not mentioned Iran's possible role. {snip} “The thing that makes Iran so dangerous is it not only exports its weapons to proxies in Lebanon, Syria, and Iraq, but it brags...

A British nuclear expert has fallen to his death from the 17th floor of the United Nations offices in Vienna. The 47-year-old man died after falling more than 120ft to the bottom of a stairwell. He has not been named. He worked for the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty Organization, an international agency charged with uncovering illicit nuclear tests. A UN spokesman in the Austrian capital said there were no "suspicious circumstances" surrounding the man's death. Police said no other person was believed to have been involved. No suicide note has been found. Four months ago another UN worker also believed to...

MOSCOW –  Striving to salvage ties amid a fierce dispute over Syria, the United States and Russia on Wednesday agreed to work together on an international investigation of a Syrian chemical weapons attack last week that prompted retaliatory American missile strikes. Washington blames Russia's ally, Syrian President Bashar Assad, while Moscow says Syrian rebels are responsible. After a day of discussions with U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said the former Cold War foes agreed a U.N. probe of events in northern Syria on April 4 was necessary. More than 80 people were killed in...

The director of a top American spy agency said Tuesday that he believed that material from Iraq's illicit weapons program had been transported into Syria and perhaps other countries as part of an effort by the Iraqis to disperse and destroy evidence immediately before the recent war.The official, James R. Clapper Jr., a retired lieutenant general, said satellite imagery showing a heavy flow of traffic from Iraq into Syria, just before the American invasion in March, led him to believe that illicit weapons material ''unquestionably'' had been moved out of Iraq.''I think people below the Saddam Hussein-and-his-sons level saw what...

The household cleaning agent chlorine, in heavy concentration is purchased by Iran and and fitted with detonators, to provide President Bashar Assad with a vehicle for cheating on his undertaking to surrender Syria’s chemical arsenal under the year-old US-Russian chemical disarmament accord. And Assad is indeed getting away with using chlorine bombs, with crippling effect, especially on children, every few days. On April 7, Israel Defense Minister Moshe Ya’alon offered chapter and verse to prove that the Syrian army had perpetrated a chemical attack on civilians in he town of Harasta on March 27, causing scores of serious injuries and...

WASHINGTON — U.S. warships launched dozens of cruise missiles against a Syrian government-controlled air base Thursday in a major retaliatory strike against Syrian president Bashar Assad for chemical attacks against scores of civilians earlier this week. The missiles were launched by the Rota, Spain-based U.S. guided missile destroyers USS Ross and USS Porter from the Mediterranean Sea and were programmed to hit aircraft shelters, ammunition storage sites, radar sites, aircraft and fuel sites at Shayrat Air Base. That base is where Assad regime military aircraft that carried out the chemical strike launched from, President Donald Trump said in an address...

Syrian Accountability Act to Combat Terrorism By Jim Hauser Talon News December 18, 2003WASHINGTON (Talon News) -- Last week, President Bush signed into law H.R. 1828, the Syria Accountability and Lebanese Sovereignty Restoration Act of 2003. The legislation calls on the president to impose sanctions on Syria to discourage support for international terrorist groups and the occupation of Lebanon.The bill demands that Syria end support for terrorism; halt the development of weapons of mass destruction (WMD) along with medium- and long-range missiles; and withdraw the roughly 20,000 troops it has deployed in Lebanon.It also calls on Syria to "enter into...

Kim Jong-nam 'killed by VX nerve agent found on his face' Kim Jong-nam, the half-brother of North Korea's leader, was killed by a highly toxic nerve agent, says Malaysia. Mr Kim died last week after two women wiped a substance over his face in a check-in hall at Kuala Lumpur airport. Malaysian toxicology reports have identified the chemical as "VX nerve agent", classified as a weapon of mass destruction by the United Nations.

In August 2007, because certain intelligence agencies were not convinced of Israeli claims that President Bashar Assad was engaged in the construction of a nuclear weapons facility, Israel sent sent 12 members of the Sayeret Matkal commando unit into Syria in two helicopters to collect soil samples outside the site in question. Needless to say, this was a highly dangerous operation. And it very nearly went wrong. The commandos were almost exposed when a Syrian patrol drove past the landing site where the helicopters were parked. But it was well worth it. The results provided "clear-cut proof" of the nuclear...

Larry Elder answers a question about an Iraqi top official supporting the idea that Iraq had WMDs and exported the majority of them to Syria. Here are the two sections in my main post dealing with General Sada: ✦ #2 Man -- http://religiopoliticaltalk.com/wmd/#sada1 ✦ #2 Man ~ a Second Time -- http://religiopoliticaltalk.com/wmd/#sada2 This will be added to the post on WMDs

Satellite Pics Suggest Iran, North Korea Cooperating on Nuclear Research by TheTower.org Staff | 12.29.16 4:28 pm The discovery of a working North Korean missile site that was previously thought to be inactive may suggest that the country is cooperating with Iran on ballistic missile and nuclear technology, Voice of America reported Wednesday. PRESS RELEASE: Strategic Sentinel Finds Previously Unknown North Korean Site Read more here: https://t.co/NJk9a9LBgd#NorthKorea #VOA @W7VOA pic.twitter.com/f3S24izQOn — Strategic Sentinel (@StratSentinel) December 28, 2016 Satellite images taken and analyzed by the intelligence firm Strategic Sentinel discovered a missile silo in Geumchang-ri, a mountainous area in North Pyongan...

Nizar Najoef, a Syrian journalist who recently defected from Syria to Western Europe and is known for bravely challenging the Syrian regime, said in a letter Monday, January 5, to Dutch newspaper “Di Telegraaf,” that he knows the three sites where Iraq’s WMD are kept. The storage places are: 1. Tunnels dug under the town of al-Baida near the city of Hama in northern Syria. These tunnels are an integral part of an underground factory, built by the North Koreans, for producing Syrian Scud missiles. Iraqi chemical weapons and long-range missiles are stored in these tunnels. 2. The village of...

BASRA, Iraq, Feb. 25 (UPI) -- More than 50 bullet holes in the wall of the empty swimming pool at "Chemical Ali's" house here indicate just how violent the former Saddam Hussein operative could be.Border police who have taken over the house don't go out to the pool much, said Col. Ali Hussein Jabar, commander of about 30 men working there. Bad things happened there, Jabar said. The relatively modest two-story house is built on an artificial hill surrounded by concrete. It looks out over flat, desolate desert sands inhabited only by sheep herders and oil pipeline guards for as...

<p>The former number two official in Saddam Hussein's Iraqi air force claims the former Iraqi dictator moved weapons of mass destruction from Iraq to Syria in the months preceding the current Iraq war.</p>

Islamic State militants attacked Syrian army troops with mustard gas in an offensive against a Syrian military airport in the eastern province of Deir al-Zor that borders Iraq, state media said on late Monday. Syrian state media did not disclose how many casualties were sustained in the latest drive by the hardline fundamentalist Sunni militants to capture the heavily defended airport located south of Deir al Zor city, whose main neighborhoods are under the militants control. "The terrorists fired rockets carrying mustard gas," a statement said on state owned Ikhbariyah television station.

Al-Afari And Away: Ignoring the Saddam-ISIS link by Daniel Clark During two Republican primary debates, presidential frontrunner Donald Trump claimed that Saddam Hussein had been an enemy of Islamic terrorism, and argued that he should have been left in power to kill terrorists, so that our soldiers didn't have to. Considering that, one might think a reminder of Saddam's moustache-deep involvement in terrorism, along with the fact that he'd retained an active chemical weapons program between wars, would be a major news story. One might even expect that a story about a former member of Saddam’s regime helping ISIS to...

As Israel considers allowing Egypt to control the critical Philadelphi corridor along Israel’s border, startling revelations about Egyptian chemical weapons proliferation are coming to light. Egypt secretly helped former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein in his chemical weapons program, according to a CIA report. The report, authored by the CIA’s Iraq Survey Group, says that Egypt sent specialists to Iraq in the 1980s to help him manufacture poison gas. Iraq later used the gas against Iranian citizens as well as Iraqi Kurds. The report says that the Iraqi government paid Egypt $12 million, "in return for assistance with production and storage...

Throughout the Bush years, liberals repeated "Bush lied, people died" like a mantra. That slander wasn't true then and it's not anymore true now that it has resurfaced. There are many legitimate criticisms of the way the Bush Administration conducted the war in Iraq and even more of the way Obama threw away all the blood and treasure we spent there for the sake of politics, but you have to be malicious or just an imbecile at this point to accuse Bush of lying about WMDs. To begin with, numerous foreign intelligence agencies also believed that Saddam Hussein had an...

aded on Jun 12, 2007 Former Secretary of State Colin Powell, appearing on the June 10, 2007, edition of "Meet The Press," reiterated and expanded on his claim that he was misled by unknown forces in the intelligence community who failed to reveal vital information to him before his infamous February 5, 2003, speech before the

It was weird that an angry Code Pink-style protester interrupted last night's Republican presidential debate with a barrage of familiar Democratic talking points about George W. Bush - that he lied the country into a disastrous war in Iraq, failed to prevent the September 11 attacks, and even whiffed on an opportunity to kill Osama bin Laden. It was especially weird that the protestor was one Donald J. Trump, who happens to be the front-runner for the Republican nomination. Trump didn't just call the Iraq war a mistake. He called it "a big fat mistake." And he didn't call it...