Numerous sources are reporting that secret US documents released by Wikileaks have revealed that George W. Bush was right about Iraq having WMDs prior to invasion by US forces. However, the documents cited by the reports are not directly obtainable from the Wikileaks web site because of denial of service and domain shutdowns in the ongoing cyber war between US intelligence and DOD sources and the Wikileaks hackers and supporters.
Until now, any evidence of WMD and yellow cake Uranium has been explained away as low grade and in small quantities or just not pickled up by the mainstream media. However, Brian Murphy of the Associate Press reported in July of 2008 that the US secretly shipped 550 metric tons (1.2 million pounds) of yellowcake as part of a sale to Canada in an effort to keep it out of the hands of insurgents.
The Yellowcake was explained away as being left over from an Iraqi nuclear reactor that was bombed by the Israelis in 1981 and had been later was documented and inspected by UN inspectors. It was stored in aging drums and containers since before the 1991 Gulf War. However, it was after the fall of Saddam in the second Gulf War and looters started stealing the drums for drinking water that US forces seized the yellow cake and kept it under guard until the shipment.
Questions were asked as to why Iraq never tried to sell the highly valuable yellow cake when it was in bad need of money before the war, but that is where the Wikileaks documents provide the answers as well as more information about chemical weapons that has surfaced. They also are alleged to give credibility that Iraq did seek to buy more yellow cake from Nigeria despite the infamous claims of Joe Wilsons to the contrary.
According to a 2006 Wikileaks released report, U.S. military intelligence discovered chemical weapons labs, captured insurgents who were experts in the creation of toxins, and uncovered nerve agent chemical weapons that had been smuggled into Iraq from Iran. However, this is not the only source that is known of the agents. The Iraqis produced their own and used them during the Iraq Iran War, but they were supposed to have been destroyed as part of the cease fire agreement from the 1991 Gulf War.
These reports would also be in keeping with numerous discoveries of nerve agents and blister agents that Iraq possessed that they claimed did not exist and were reported to have been destroyed under the terms of the cease-fire that ended the 1991 Gulf War. In one case, as many as 14 individual 55-gallon drums of the agents were discovered by U.S. soldiers about 40 miles north of Tikrit. While some claim that 770 gallons of chemical weapons is not much, the fact that nearly 4 tons out of a total of 795 tons of nerve gas that was documented as being produced by Iraq is a major find.
When you consider that a few ounces of nerve gas properly dispersed can kill thousands of people, it does not take long to figure out that these agents were being hidden until the heat was off from the United States so that further development of delivery systems and use by terrorists groups could be made. The same goes for the yellowcake and the nuclear processing capabilities according to the captured experts.
Nerve agents are a stronger form of the same types of chemicals in bug spray. In fact, US forces sometimes train for nerve agent detection by spraying a short blast of Raid insect killer 25 yards upwind of chemical detectors to set the detectors off.
This is not the only discovery of Iraqi chemical weapons that has come to light. Several unnamed sources in the US military have reported that old news reports about a truck from Syria that was stopped inside Saudi Arabia by Saudi forces that contained several chemical artillery rounds did not report all the facts. They allege that the lot numbers on the rounds matched lot numbers of Iraqi rounds recorded in Iraqi records. These sources go on to say that there is credible proof that exists that Iraq sent convoys of trucks loaded with WMDs to Syria before the Second Gulf War and that these rounds were suspected as being part of those shipments.
No matter where one stands on the Wikileaks document dumps, the truth about Iraq's WMDs will never convince some people. Unfortunately, these are the same people still arguing over who is responsible for pulling off 9/11.
References:
R1, R2, R3, R4, R5, R6, R7, R8, R9, R10, R11, R12
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Dr. Michael Williams writes for both the national Conservative Examiner and the local Albuquerque Family Examiner columns. You can follow him on Twitter: @drmlwilliams. To learn more about him or to see a comprehensive list of his articles and other published works go to drmichaelwilliams.com.
Comments
We don't need wiki leaks to know about the yellowcake! The same can be said for other chemical and biological substances known to be found in Iraq.
http://www.defense.gov/news/newsarticle.aspx?id=50430
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/25546334/
The problem is that people had already formed opinions about wmd before the information was released, and the article didn't exactly get front page placement or lead on the broadcast news shows! The media had no interest in admitting that they had improperly lambasted GWB for years. To this day, they ignore or minimize these facts.
Kudos to GWB for placing the safety of the troops handling the materials and the need to prevent terrorists from obtaining the found wmd above the huge political benefit that he would have gained by releasing this information that was known early in the Iraq war timeline.
It's sad, but I think that most Americans need to see a tragedy resulting from wmd before they recognize that it's real. A few drops of nerve gas or a big pile of yellow dust appear harmless to those who fail to educate themselves. Maybe if a nuclear icbm had appeared from beneath the sand, it would have had an impact on public opinion, but the media would probably have just said, "What threat is a single missle?" Unfortunately, our ignorance has made us much more vulnerable to just such a future tradgedy.
DoD's Whitman gave his typically half-truth quote. the yellowcake had been under IAEA seal since the end of Desert Storm, it was well known where it was the whole time, was sucured within days of the OIF invasion - and it still had the IAEA seals on it when it was evenutally shipped out.
The only chemical agents found that had not been destroyed years earlier by UNSCOM or the Iraqis themselves in theri effort to hide the extent of their pre-Desert Storm programs were a small quantity of incorrectly marked containers and shells, predating 1991.
And since the Iraqi chemical programs produced such poor quality agents, they were effectively useless by 2003.
Even the Bush Administration eventually agreed that Iraq had no effective WMDs nor effective WMD program by the time of the 2003 invasion - that they had misread the intelligence.
So you neo-cons can stop trying to defend that; Bush admitted he goofed.
1) I never stated the yellowcake was useless - I said it was under IAEA seal since 1991. As for the risk, yellowcake can be and is transported in things as "secure" as covered dump trucks. (Check Colorado trucking laws, for example.)
Yellowcake is unusable for anything until it is processed further - and Iraq's entire processing and uranium enrichment capability was destroyed by the end of Desert Storm and never reconstructed.
2) As for the chemical agents, you simply are full of bovine excrement. Long ago and far away, in the Army I carried a secondary MOS of 54B (now called 74D) - Chemical Operations Specialist. I was recalled to active duty for Desert Storm and was involved in the Khamisiyah cleanup after the inadvertent chemical release when they blew up the ammo dump.
I also had the chance to visit Iraq with UNSCOM and saw firsthand in 1995 the poor quality of Iraqi chemical agents.
And since i still have extensive contacts in that world, I'm not only familiar with the report of the Iraqi Survey Group, I've had beers with several of the members.
Iraq under Saddam had NO effective chemical, biological or nuclear weapons or weapons programs by the time of the 2003 start of OIF. Period.
3) Some caches and chemical labs were found AFTER OIF began - set up by the insurgents using materials brought into Iraq after the coalition invasion. Few of those presented any significant risk and, to date, no one has been liste3d as a casualty from any of those POST-SADDAM attempts at WMDs.
4) Rumsfeld now (as of 2006) denies he ever claimed that Iraq had WMDs - despite the videos available of him claiming in 2003 that "we know where they are..."
Bush at least admits that his belief was wrong, but still argues that's what the intel said.
5) Shove your "lying commie" up your 4th point of contact, LEG. Unlike you, obviously, I know what real commies were, having faced them in Vietnam, across the Fulda Gap and Checkpoint Charlie and a couple times in Central America.
If you can't handle the truth that the second Iraq War was "the wrong war at the wrong time in the wrong place for the wrong reasons," it's time to grow up and face the reality.
I guess YOU missed the word SECONDARY MOS. Primary was 11B4S. (You know what that changed to, right?)
And I guess you missed that reference to Central America; you know, during the Reagan Administration?
Never try to teach your grandma how to suck eggs, child.
Never mind the fact that leaked documents in question are, at best, initial field reports - or that they say nothing about Iraq WMDs in existence in March 2003, at invasion time.
Two types of things were found: 1) Old, decayed WMDs that predated Desert Storm, were no longer effective and, in most cases, had simply been missed by UNSCOM AND the Iraqi coverup destruction in 1991-92. (Iraq never had Soviet-quality agents; their binaries never worked and even their mustard degraded quickly - much of it tended to polymerize and become solid, making it harder to decon but useless as an agent.)
2) A small number of homemade chemical agents and devices put together AFTER the March 2003 invasion by insurgents and/or al Q in Iraq.
Nothing in the Wikileaks docs shows otherwise.
Weird deletions? Seems this is a thread missing half the thread.
They were removed for violating posting rules- abusive. Thanks for commenting.
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