http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,83252,00.html

On Friday, troops at a training facility in the western Iraqi desert came across a bottle labeled "tabun" -- a nerve gas and chemical weapon Iraq is banned from possessing.

Closer to Baghdad, troops at Iraq's largest military industrial complex found nerve agent antidotes, documents describing chemical warfare and a white powder that appeared to be used for explosives.

U.N. weapons inspectors went repeatedly to the vast al Qa Qaa complex -- most recently on March 8 -- but found nothing during spot visits to some of the 1,100 buildings at the site 25 miles south of Baghdad.

[but wait! I thought they hadn't been there since JANUARY???!!!]

Col. John Peabody, engineer brigade commander of the 3rd Infantry Division, said troops found thousands of 2-by-5-inch boxes, each containing three vials of white powder, together with documents written in Arabic that dealt with how to engage in chemical warfare.

Initial reports suggest the powder is an explosive, but tests are still being done, a senior U.S. official said. If confirmed, it would be consistent with what the Iraqis say is the plant's purpose, producing explosives and propellants.

According to U.N. weapons inspectors, who spoke on condition of anonymity, the Iraqis filled warheads and artillery shells with explosives at the site and manufactured bomb casings there. The activities, for conventional weaponry, were allowed under U.N. resolutions. But the resolutions, passed after the 1991 Gulf War, ban Iraq from possessing chemical, biological and nuclear weapons and the long-range missiles to deliver them.

Peabody told an Associated Press reporter that troops at al Qa Qaa also discovered atropine, used to counter the effects of nerve agents, and 2-PAM chloride, which is used in combination with atropine in case of chemical attack.

The presence of atropine, and the discovery of gas masks and chemical suits earlier in the war, could indicate Iraq was preparing to use chemical weapons.

For years, the al Qa Qaa site has raised the suspicions of weapons inspectors who believed the facilities could be converted for the production of missiles and chemical and nuclear weapons. It was visited repeatedly during the 1990s and during the last cycle of inspections -- between Nov. 27 and March 17 -- when U.N. experts went to the complex more than 10 times.

According to a British dossier on Iraq published last September, parts of al Qa Qaa's chemical complex, destroyed in 1991, were repaired and are now operational, including a production plant for the chemical weapon phosgene.

Nuclear inspectors believe an area of the complex was involved in designing an atomic bomb before Iraq's nuclear program was destroyed by U.N. teams after the 1991 Gulf War. The facility also made lenses and other components that can be used to trigger nuclear explosions.

In March 1990, customs officers at Heathrow Airport in London seized a case of capacitors -- components for triggers in nuclear weapons -- bound for al Qa Qaa that were especially designed for detonating nuclear warheads.

Inspectors had installed cameras and sensors around the complex after the Gulf War but the Iraqis dismantled the equipment when inspectors left in 1998. The U.N. inspectors who returned in November had planned to install new monitoring equipment but ran out of time.

Much is riding on the disarmament process.

The United States believes Iraq has chemical and biological weapons and a reviving nuclear weapons program.

But the Bush administration was unable to convince much of the world in the run-up to the war.

Countries including France and Russia blocked the United States from winning U.N. support for the war partly because they saw no proof that Iraq possessed such weapons. The chief weapons inspectors reported several times that they had found nothing to support the administration's claims.

So far, invading U.S. forces have not found chemical or biological weapons. Officials and former weapons inspectors have said discoveries were likely to be made closer to Baghdad. Several large facilities, such as al Qa Qaa, are within 50 miles of the capital.

"We believe that this regime does possess weapons of mass destruction, we remain convinced of that," U.S. Brig. Gen. Vincent Brooks said Friday. He said some weapons may have been pulled into the Baghdad area, "either delivery systems, or, potentially, storage systems."

But a discovery far from the Iraqi capital was made Friday when troops in the western desert came across what they believe is a training center for nuclear, chemical and biological warfare, Brooks said.

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. There was no way to immediately confirm whether the substance was indeed tabun and soldiers found only a small amount, 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," he 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.

Iraq declared to U.N. inspectors the overall production of 3,859 tons of chemical weapons agents. According to Iraq's declarations, mustard, tabun and sarin were produced in large quantities. Iraq also admitted production of 3.9 tons of the deadly nerve agent VX.

Subsequently, inspectors destroyed 116 tons of tabun and more than 1,000 tons of ingredients for brewing up the nerve gas.

Iraq has repeatedly claimed that it destroyed its unconventional weapons programs after 1991. The claim was voiced again on April 1 by Iraqi Vice President Taha Yassin Ramadan. Referring to the gas masks and other chemical gear found by advancing coalition troops, he suggested U.S. forces were planning to plant evidence 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."

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I'll get nicer when you get smarter.

Great post Catz! I've always said that just because no WMDs have been found, doesn't mean they don't exist. Iraq has a lot of desert wilderness area, and who knows what may be concealed under all that sand and rocks, deep in underground bunkers and tunnels. In my opinion, the U.N. weapons inspectors weren't really trying that hard to find anything, because that nefarious organization was involved in those under-the-table "food for oil" dealings, and didn't want to rock the boat too much. I think they were, in fact, giving Saddam plenty of time to move things around so they wouldn't be found.

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http://www.freedomswatch.org/Home/tabid/36/Default.aspx

When religion ruled the world...wasn't that the Dark Ages?

Now let's hear from a Legitimate News source...

http://abcnews.go.com/International/wireStory?id=207910

TV Video May Show Missing Explosives

WASHINGTON Oct 29, 2004 — Videotape shot by a Minnesota television crew traveling with U.S. troops in Iraq when they first opened the bunkers at the Al-Qaqaa munitions base nine days after the fall of Saddam Hussein shows what appeared to be high explosives still in barrels and bearing the markings of the International Atomic Energy Agency.

The video taken by KSTP of St. Paul on April 18, 2003, could reinforce suggestions that tons of explosives missing from a munitions installation in Iraq were looted after the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq. The video was broadcast nationally Thursday on ABC.

"The photographs are consistent with what I know of Al-Qaqaa," David A. Kay, a former American official who directed the hunt in Iraq for unconventional weapons and visited the site, told The New York Times. "The (*)(*)(*)(*)ing thing is the seals. The Iraqis didn't use seals on anything. So I'm absolutely sure that's an IAEA seal."

The question of what happened to the tons of explosives has become a major issue in the closing days of the presidential campaign.

Democrat John Kerry says the missing explosives powerful enough to demolish a building, bring down a jetliner or set off a nuclear weapon are another example of the Bush administration's poor planning and incompetence in handling the war in Iraq. President Bush says the explosives were possibly removed by Saddam's forces before the invasion.

Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld entered the debate Thursday, suggesting the 377 tons of explosives were taken away before U.S. forces arrived, saying any large effort to loot the material afterward would have been detected.

"We would have seen anything like that," he said in one of two radio interviews he gave at the Pentagon. "The idea it was suddenly looted and moved out, all of these tons of equipment, I think is at least debatable."

The Pentagon also declassified and released a single image, taken by reconnaissance aircraft or satellite just days before the war, showing two trucks outside one of the dozens of storage bunkers at the Al-Qaqaa munitions base.

The particular bunker is not one known to have contained any of the missing explosives, and Pentagon spokesman Larry Di Rita said the image only shows that there was some Iraqi activity at the base when it was taken, on March 17. Di Rita said the image says nothing about what happened to the explosives.

Rumsfeld, in one radio interview, also cast doubt on the suggestion of one of his subordinates that Russian forces assisted the Iraqis in removing them.

John Shaw, the deputy U.S. undersecretary of defense for international technology security, suggested to The Washington Times in an interview that the Russians may have been involved, prompting an angry denial from Moscow.

Rumsfeld said, "I have no information on that at all, and cannot validate that even slightly."

But at issue is whether the weapons were moved before or after U.S. forces occupied that region of the country in early April. No one has been able to provide conclusive evidence either way, although Iraqi officials blamed it on poor U.S. security after Baghdad fell.

The Pentagon has said it's looking into the matter, and officials note that 400,000 tons of recovered Iraqi munitions have either been destroyed or are slated to be destroyed.

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Truth is by nature self-evident, as soon as you remove the cobwebs of ignorance that surround it, it shines clear. Gandhi

This is the biggest hairball you've ever spit up.

David Kay mentioned time and again that not only were the WMD not found but that technicians were skimming money from the funds used to build them. Kay exhaustively had his staff look into whether any factories existed to build WMD. He found evidence of none. You just can't hide something if it never existed to begin with. No matter how many times Bush's inspectors confirm that no WMD existed the Bush whakos keep insisting they're out there. Your delusions are borne of desperation.

Also I posted an article on this web site on how the Iraqi aluminum tubes the Bush administration told us were being used to build a nuclear centrifuge was a false claim. Bush's own Energy Dept told him the tolerances for these tubes were unsuitable for nuclear weapons processing. Bush and Cheney insisted to the T.V audience they were for nuclear purposes despite warnings to the contrary. This was yet another fraudulent way of scaring Americans into supporting an invasion.

Go take a catnap. You need a long rest.

Would that be part of the Legitimate News (proper noun) conglomerate?

Why don't we hear from a legitimate poster?

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What have you done for your people today?

Because it's my sense that your position here is just a dodge to avoid dealing with inconvenient facts.


Can you point us to a story that Fox News has made up facts for, or used forged materials to support, or that has been factually discredited?

Catz

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I'll get nicer when you get smarter.

any source that puts Bush in an illegitimate light is unreliable. And by the way, this is an AP news report. Care to explain what is wrong with the AP?

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All you need to know about the energy crisis:
ANWR Exploration Republicans: 91% Supported. Democrats: 86% Opposed.
Coal-to-liquid R's: 90% YES. D's: 78% NO.
Oil Shale Exploration R's: 90% YES. D's: 86% NO.
Outer Continental Shelf Exploration R's: 81% YES. D's: 83% NO.
Increased Refinery Capacity R's: 97% YES. D's: 96% NO

SUMMARY: 91% of House Republicans have historically voted to increase the production of America’s own oil and gas. 86% of House Democrats have historically voted against.

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I'll get nicer when you get smarter.

Are you suggesting I'm a pretend person? Oooooh, EUP - Don't look behind you but the Wolf is gonna getcha

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Truth is by nature self-evident, as soon as you remove the cobwebs of ignorance that surround it, it shines clear. Gandhi

you don't have enough experience with EuP. He's the wolf who's going to get you.



Popcorn's on me...(settles in to watch the dismemberment)

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I'll get nicer when you get smarter.