http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2003/...in547667.shtml
The story:
U.S. troops found thousands of boxes of white powder, nerve agent antidote and Arabic documents on how to engage in chemical warfare at an industrial site south of Baghdad. But a senior U.S. official familiar with initial testing said the materials were believed to be explosives.
Col. John Peabody, engineer brigade commander of the 3rd Infantry Division, said the materials were found Friday at the Latifiyah industrial complex just south of Baghdad.
"It is clearly a suspicious site," Peabody said.
CBS News National Security Correspondent David Martin reports that the hunt for weapons of mass destruction continues at sites where the U.S. thought chemicals weapons might be hidden.
"And although there are no reports of actual weapons being found, there are constant finds of suspicious material," Martin said. "It obviously will take laboratory testing to find out exactly what that powder is."
The senior U.S. official, based in Washington and speaking on condition of anonymity, said the material was under further study. The site is enormous and U.S. troops are still investigating it for potential weapons of mass destruction, the official said.
"Initial reports are that the material is probably just explosives, but we're still going through the place," the official said.
Peabody said troops found thousands of boxes, each of which contained three vials of white powder, together with documents written in Arabic that dealt with how to engage in chemical warfare.
He also said they discovered atropine, used to counter the effects of nerve agents.
The facility had been identified by the International Atomic Energy Agency as a suspected chemical, biological and nuclear weapons site. U.N. inspectors visited the plant at least nine times, including as recently as Feb. 18.
The facility is part of a larger complex known as the Latifiyah Explosives and Ammunition Plant al Qa Qaa.
During the 1991 Gulf War, U.S. jets bombed the plant.
Troops also discovered what they believe is a training center for nuclear, chemical and biological warfare in Iraq's western desert, Brig. Gen. Vincent Brooks said Friday.
One bottle found at the site was labeled "tabun" — a nerve agent that the U.S. government says may have been used during the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq war. The soldiers found only a small amount of the chemical, indicating the site was meant for training, not storing or deploying chemical weapons, Brooks said.
"In that particular site, we believe that was the only sample," Brooks said. "
That's why we believe it was a training site. Our conclusion is that this was not a (weapons of mass destruction) site ... it proved to be far less than that."
Photos of the site showed shelves of brown bottles with yellow labels. Brooks said troops did not understand some of the labels and were collecting the bottles for examination by experts.
On April 1, Iraqi Vice President Taha Yassin Ramadan, in a statement on Iraqi television, repeated Baghdad's position that it had no weapons of mass destruction. Referring to reports that gas masks and other chemical gear had been found elsewhere in the country, he said the coalition might plant weapons of mass destruction to implicate Iraq.
"Let me say one more time that Iraq is free of weapons of mass destruction," he said.
"The aggressors may themselves intend to bring those materials to plant them here and say those are weapons of mass destruction," he said.
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Perhaps the next story from IAEA, and subsequent follow-up Kerry ad, will involve how we actually BROUGHT THOSE AGENTS IN WITH US.
Further on this story:
TODAY from CBS News (how quickly they forget!):
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2004/...in651082.shtml
Charles Duelfer, the head of that unit, told CBS News Tuesday that he has not received any orders to go looking for the missing explosives and doesn't think he should.
"It's hard for me to get that worked up about it," said Duelfer, in a phone interview from Baghdad,
noting that Iraq is awash in hundreds of thousands of tons of explosives.
Duelfer also said U.N. weapons inspectors recommended in 1995 that the high explosives be destroyed because of their potential use in a nuclear weapons program.
The International Atomic Energy Agency instead ordered the explosives stored in sealed bunkers 30 miles south of the Iraqi capital. The last time the IAEA verified that the bunkers were still sealed was in March of last year, about a month before the first U.S. troops moved into the complex as they pushed toward Baghdad.
Pentagon officials contend the explosives could have been spirited away by the Iraqis before u.s. troops ever got there. Other officials, including Delfer, blame looters and the chaos that following the fall of Baghdad.
When troops from the 101st Airborne Division's 2nd Brigade arrived at the Al-Qaqaa base a day or so after other coalition troops seized Baghdad on April 9, 2003, there were already looters throughout the facility, Lt. Col. Fred Wellman, deputy public affairs officer for the unit, told The Associated Press.
The soldiers "secured the area they were in and looked in a limited amount of bunkers to ensure chemical weapons were not present," said Wellman, in an e-mail message to The Associated Press. "Bombs were found but not chemical weapons in that immediate area.
Orders were not given from higher to search or to secure the facility or to search for HE type munitions, as they (high-explosive weapons) were everywhere in Iraq."
A few facts to bear in mind, boys and girls.
1) Those explosives wouldn't have been in existence if the IAEA (under Hans Blix) had done it's job.
2) There were over 10,000 sites in Iraq with explosives and munitions in them.
3) The priority, as per CONGRESS, was WMDs.
Catz