ISIS in Iraq seizes control of Saddam Hussein’s chemical weapons facility

Simon W. Moon said:

I have a bottle of Ammonia and a bottle of bleach.
Do I have WMD pre-cursors?

You have to be able to draw a line somewhere between chemicals which are merely dangerous and chemicals which are weapons.
Otherwise we have to say that there're thousands of tons of WMD being moved around our country by rail at this very moment. But that's not really a helpful thing to say is it? Cause those tanker cars are not really weapons. They're just containers of dangerous chemicals.
ite.

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I was not aware that the U.S. routinely shipped Sarin, VX and Mustard as around on rail cars.

Re: ISIL seizes Saddam's chemical weapons plant

JasperL said:

You can't sell a war based on the existence of military grade WMD existing, being distributed to commanders in the field

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The funny thing is - we actually tracked that as it occurred. Then we overran their positions and they had the special arty units all set up to fire the shells that never came....


A) The Iraq War was "sold" (argued for) on a lot more than just WMD.
B) however,

assert we know they have existing mobile production labs - see, there's one there, and over here are five sites we know store chemical weapons, etc.

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Yeah. We got that intel from the Germans, who had a source who had "worked" those facilities. We asked to talk to him ourselves so we could put him to the test (lie detector, human interrogation with control questions, etc), and the Germans told us he was virulently anti-American and so we couldn't talk to him. That turned out later to be a lie - no idea why they did that.

(reread what Powell told the UN), and then when we find NONE of that, but we do find some old, degraded, unusable except for 'dirty bomb' material, pretend that's enough to justify the war.

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I don't know of anyone who is.

If they told us old degraded stuff was the reason we went in, fine. That's not what was sold to the world.

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Well, it wasn't what they thought at the time.

To the victor go the spoils.... :mrgreen:

Dayton3 said:

I was not aware that the U.S. routinely shipped Sarin, VX and Mustard as around on rail cars.

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I guess I missed my mark with the last post. Ahh, well.


If I am not mistaken, many chemical weapons combine precursors once activated to prevent the breakdown of the active chemical. F'rintstints, a chemical munitions may not actually contain nerve gas, but rather chemicals which when mixed together will produce nerve gas.


Here is information which you may find interesting


Chemical Weapons Programs - Iraq Special Weapons Facilities

Chemical Weapons Programs: History

soot said:

Based on the word of an EOD buddy who was on the contract to seal up and make safe Al Muthanna in 2006, no precursors or anything that could be easily used by booger eaters to fashion operable WMDs are available on the site.

In the bunkers, VX, GB, and Potassium Cyanide in various stages of advanced degradation.

Any attempt by ISIS to open the sealed bunkers and extract the agents would result in immediate local (ISIS) casualties and an environmental risk to the surrounding area. Drums of chems are stored in rusting barrels that are sitting in three feet of stagnant water and chemical ooze.

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What if they loaded a couple of these on a flat-bed with some C4 and drove them into Baghdad?

Re: ISIL seizes Saddam's chemical weapons plant

notquiteright said:

More like vapid CON no-sense... :doh

Minute amounts of old chem weapons doesn't a stockpile make.

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:shrug: I don't know if I'd call 500 rounds "minute" - but then that's a subjective term. How many do you think we maintain?

Some arty pro-jos tested positive but were 'rebranded' shells filled with explosives. I can only find 2 cases where an IED tested positive for chem AND apparently were so degraded they failed to be lethal

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:shrug: both of which still prove the point being made A) Saddam still had legacy WMD and B) he did not have ongoing production programs.

Did you read the Faux Noise article you cite? 2 tons of 3-5% uranium that CAN'T be used for a dirty bomb..

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that is correct. The 1,000 or so side-stored radioactive materials found with it were what could be used for dirty bombs - the main purpose for enriched uranium is nuclear energy, either slow and steady out of a plant, or all of a sudden out of a bomb.

The 2007 CIA report on the 'facility' claims the buildings are razed, the equipment destroyed, and the chem stockpiles are old damaged and contaminated.

You have done ZERO to counter the simplistic chant- 'Bush lied and good troops died'... eace

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I don't have to counter it. It's naive idiocy is at this point rather self-apparent. I might as well suggest that Obama was deliberately lying when his administration gave us the unemployment projections for the stimulus. It's not that he was lying - it's that he was wrong, and wrong largely because he'd been informed wrongly by the experts, who themselves had good reasons for being wrong.

WCH said:

What if they loaded a couple of these on a flat-bed with some C4 and drove them into Baghdad?

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It would make a mess, for sure.

What kind of problems would that cause for me here in beautiful northern New Jersey?

Not a one.

Kinda hard for me to care about this.

Re: ISIL seizes Saddam's chemical weapons plant

TheDemSocialist said:

They our government has already admitted that and weapons inspectors in the past stated the exact same thing.

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And I hope they are correct. I have learned that westerners tend to mirror-image capability, forgetting that people who grow up having to jury-rig everything can make equipment work longer and further than we would have thought. But we have some pretty good CBRN people, so I would bet they are probably correct.

One POS roadside bomb that caused no damage! Proof Iraq had a large quanity of WMDS and was a dangerous threat! War was worth it!

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See, this is your problem - you are so dedicated to the notion of discrediting any kind of argument in favor of the war, that you are unable to view this issue outside of that lense. I'm not trying to argue that the illicit materials Saddam had were justification in and of themselves for the invasion - only that he had them.

No. Not this report again. :doh More old unusable weapons.

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Unusable as artillery shells, yes - but chem for a terror group isn't useful for it's kinetic strike enhancement capability, but for the Information Effects.

no its the correct argument. Even the Bush administration and the intelligence community admits we found nothing.

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That's an interesting claim, given that I have cited for you the Director of National Intelligence and the National Ground Intelligence Center saying that is not accurate.

You have went from the point of "Iraq wasnt invaded on a lie, it was invaded on faulty intelegence and there was no WMDS". Then I showed that the Bush admin only listened to what they wanted to hear and there was a lot of dissent against the official position of the Bush admin. To know you are saying "oh there were WMD's".

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No, I have said consistently that:

A) we did not go to war on a lie, but part of our reasons for going were wrong (for a left-wing example of this: when the Obama administration sold the stimulus package, he did not lie about the unemployment statistics, he was merely wrong)
B) we found WMD's in-country, and we found illegal missiles, but we did not find ongoing production programs, which is what we thought we would find.

You have repeatedly attempted to collapse the issue of whether or not we should have gone to war into the narrower issue of whether or not there were WMD's, and the issue of whether or not there were WMD's on whether or not there were the kinds that we didn't find v the kind that we did.

WCH said:

ISIS in Iraq seizes control of Saddam Hussein’s chemical weapons facility | BARE NAKED ISLAM

WSJ Sunni extremists in Iraq have occupied what was once Saddam Hussein’s premier chemical-weapons production facility, a complex that still contains a stockpile of old weapons, State Department and other U.S. government officials said. The capture of the chemical-weapon stockpile by the forces of the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham, known as ISIS or ISIL, the militant group that is seizing territory in the country, has grabbed the attention of the U.S.

"We remain concerned about the seizure of any military site by the ISIL,” Jen Psaki, the State Department spokeswoman, said in a written statement. “We do not believe that the complex contains CW materials of military value and it would be very difficult, if not impossible, to safely move the materials.”

The takeover underscores the chaos gripping Iraq and the possibility that the growing Sunni rebellion could further destabilize the Middle East. Not lost on U.S. government and military officials is the irony that the latest chapter in a war designed to strip Iraq of chemical weapons could see radical Sunni extremists take control of that same stockpile.

During the Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s, Hussein used the Muthanna complex to make chemical weapons, including sarin, mustard gas, and VX (a nerve agent), according the Iraq Study Group, which conducted the hunt for weapons of mass destruction in the aftermath of the war. The Iraq Study group did find chemical munitions at Muthanna but determined that inspections by United Nations Special Commission, or Unscom, had ensured the facility was dismantled and remaining chemical stocks militarily useless and sealed in bunkers.

snip


CHEMICAL WEAPONS?? I was assured by scores of Leftists that there were no CW.

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Since we went in under the guise of WMD, if for real military chemical weapons had been in Iraq, we would have seized them. But it's likely much ado about nothing.

soot said:

It would make a mess, for sure.

What kind of problems would that cause for me here in beautiful northern New Jersey?

Not a one.

Kinda hard for me to care about this.

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Which part of NJ is beautiful? Even the official NJ state botanical gardens are pedestrian and unimpressive.

Re: ISIL seizes Saddam's chemical weapons plant

TheDemSocialist said:

You do realize these weapons are obsolete. They no longer work! They are useless.

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They are useless as artillery rounds. Would you stand in a room with one and open it?

Re: ISIL seizes Saddam's chemical weapons plant

cpwill said:

The funny thing is - we actually tracked that as it occurred. Then we overran their positions and they had the special arty units all set up to fire the shells that never came....

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Right, they didn't have any chemical weapons. Hard to fire what you don't have.

A) The Iraq War was "sold" (argued for) on a lot more than just WMD.
B) however,

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True but irrelevant. No WMD, and no war. It's that simple. That we also had other reasons, that no one but foreign policy gearheads cared about, is of no consequence.

Yeah. We got that intel from the Germans, who had a source who had "worked" those facilities. We asked to talk to him ourselves so we could put him to the test (lie detector, human interrogation with control questions, etc), and the Germans told us he was virulently anti-American and so we couldn't talk to him. That turned out later to be a lie - no idea why they did that.

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I suppose the reason that might matter is with the question, "Did Bush and Co. 'lie' or were they just tragically wrong." I'm agnostic on that, and I don't think it matters.

Seems to me, based on the evidence, the the decision was more,

1) OK, we want to invade Iraq, now how can we sell this to the public? And not,
2) Iraq has this pile of WMD that pose a risk to the U.S. so should we invade Iraq to keep Amurka safe from terrism? The clearest evidence for this is they embraced ALL the evidence for WMD, and dismissed all the evidence that they were all gone for practical purposes.

So I think they believed they'd find WMD, and the only reason it mattered to anyone who actually mattered was the finding of them would justify the war that was engaged for all kinds of reasons OTHER THAN WMD.

So they didn't 'lie' about WMD, the powers (and I'm sure MANY leading democrats were in this group) just lied about why we went to war.

Ikari said:

Which part of NJ is beautiful? Even the official NJ state botanical gardens are pedestrian and unimpressive.

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I think there are plenty of parts of NJ that are awesome.

Island Beach State Park and any number of other beaches - especially at night during a "meteor shower" or a luminescent tide, Cape May, High Point, Tillman's Ravine, plenty of places along the Delaware, the wineries in Sussex County, Assunpink, Mad Horse Creek/Abbot's Meadow, Oyster Creek, Little Egg Harbor, dozens of spots in the pinelands...

Hell, I can just keep going and going and going and I haven't even considered scenic towns yet

Understand, I also think there are parts of NJ that would be in contention for asshole of the world.

If you're in New Jersey and can't find anything that appeals to you, then sucks to be you I guess.

I agree about Ringwood, it's not Allerton Gardens by any stretch, but I like to take my kid there to ride his bike.

I live in Sussex, it's mostly just the MidWest. Upstate New York is fantastic, though. And Vermont....damn does that place rock. The awesome stick just happened to miss NJ is all. Too bad the Property Tax stick didn't follow suit.

soot said:

It would make a mess, for sure.

What kind of problems would that cause for me here in beautiful northern New Jersey?

Not a one.

Kinda hard for me to care about this.

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Broken windows principle of law enforcement.

Violence and chaos in one part of the world causes more in other parts as time goes on.

Anyone that thinks violence around the world won't eventually cause problems on U.S. territory are hiding their heads in the sand.

ObamacareFail said:

I read them and Bush said no such thing. What he did say in his book was that none were found. Perhaps what ISIS actually just captured was a very large shipment of Pringles potato chips?

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Throwing the Pringles would probably be more dangerous..even in 2003.

soot said:

It would make a mess, for sure.

What kind of problems would that cause for me here in beautiful northern New Jersey?

Not a one.

Kinda hard for me to care about this.

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But what about those chickens? [that might come home to roost]

Re: ISIL seizes Saddam's chemical weapons plant

jmotivator said:

They are useless as artillery rounds. Would you stand in a room with one and open it?

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According to our government they are useless period.
"The facility in Al Muthanna is said to still contain a stockpile of old weapons. However, the militants from the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Shams will have a hard time using them, even if they manage to access them, the Wall Street Journal reported.

According to the U.S., the weapons are old, contaminated and hard to move. "We remain concerned about the seizure of any military site by the ISIL," Jen Psaki, the State Department spokeswoman, said in a written statement according to the Journal. "We do not believe that the complex contains CW materials of military value and it would be very difficult, if not impossible, to safely move the materials."

However, a survey of the site conducted by the Iraq Study Group determined the facility has since been dismantled, and that existing weapons stockpiles was sealed and unusable, the Journal said."

According to U.S. officials, the seizure of the Muthanna complex, though attention grabbing, is meaningless as far as concerns for usage of chemical weapons goes."
Iraqi militants ISIS seize Saddam's top chemical weapons facility - Middle East Israel News | Haaretz

Dayton3 said:

Broken windows principle of law enforcement.

Violence and chaos in one part of the world causes more in other parts as time goes on.

Anyone that thinks violence around the world won't eventually cause problems on U.S. territory are hiding their heads in the sand.

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LOL

Yeah, okay.

Maybe we DO need to expand the NSA, revoke the 2nd Amendment, and give bigger contracts to Halliburton.

It's the ONLY way we'll be safe from the terrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrorists.

Seriously dude, we spent most of the 1960s, 70s, 80s and 90s inciting war and violence around the world and installing/propping up brutal dictators.

Divide et impera.

When the savages are fighting each other they've got no time to fight us.

When the savages are being kept like wild animals in a cage they're so afraid of the stick and the lash that they keep their heads down and cower.

Anywhere in the world there is a tyrant with his boot on the neck of the Arab or the African, we should be there. Standing firmly behind the tyrant.

Then George W. Bush, geopolitical idiot, decides he wants to give the Arab democracy?

Are you ****ing kidding me?

Look at Somalia.

When the Soviets were supporting the Barre government Somalia was like a pet dog.

Then the Cold War drew to a close, Somalia's strategic importance was diminished, the Iron Curtain fell, the lunatics took over the asylum, the country fractured, and next thing you know you've got the Muslim Brotherhood, Egyptian Islamic Jihad, and the precursors of al Qaida running around the Horn like it's cool.

What the Soviets did to the Horn of Africa in the 90s, we just did to Arabia.

Yeah, let's get back behind Maliki and continue spreading that good ol' fashioned democracy, treating those people like they're us.

We can support him as a benign nationalist because broken windows are ugly.

And when the madrases in Iraq start preaching anti-Western Islamism like they do in Saudi Arabia (no broken windows there!) we know where the next batch of REAL terrorists will come from.

Re: ISIL seizes Saddam's chemical weapons plant

TheDemSocialist said:

According to our government they are useless period.
"The facility in Al Muthanna is said to still contain a stockpile of old weapons. However, the militants from the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Shams will have a hard time using them, even if they manage to access them, the Wall Street Journal reported.

According to the U.S., the weapons are old, contaminated and hard to move. "We remain concerned about the seizure of any military site by the ISIL," Jen Psaki, the State Department spokeswoman, said in a written statement according to the Journal. "We do not believe that the complex contains CW materials of military value and it would be very difficult, if not impossible, to safely move the materials."

However, a survey of the site conducted by the Iraq Study Group determined the facility has since been dismantled, and that existing weapons stockpiles was sealed and unusable, the Journal said."

According to U.S. officials, the seizure of the Muthanna complex, though attention grabbing, is meaningless as far as concerns for usage of chemical weapons goes."
Iraqi militants ISIS seize Saddam's top chemical weapons facility - Middle East Israel News | Haaretz

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Lol !

" Sealed " ?

What exactly does that mean ? Like welded shut ?

Bolted shut ? Is there a Child proof cap that MIGHT keep a toddler or curious Chimpanzee from killing themself ?

Because nothing is " Sealed " absolutely.

And " unusable " implies that all existing chemical stockpiles have been rendered inert, so no reason to " seal " them right ?

Re: ISIL seizes Saddam's chemical weapons plant

cpwill said:

Well, that's one of the analytical gaps we discovered later - it never occurred to anyone to consider what his motivations for running a deception campaign designed to threaten his neighbors might be.

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I like the way you put it.
I'm guessing you're probably right. Who would have thought that Saddam would mount what's basically a campaign to "out bull**** the bull****ters"...essentially "talking smack" about his capabilities both hardware and otherwise. Maybe he figured his neighbors would buy it but he didn't count on us buying it too?

Re: ISIL seizes Saddam's chemical weapons plant

Mr.Nick said:

Enriched?

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Of course it has to be enriched. That requires, among other things, transforming it into uranium hexafluoride via a network of centrifuges.
Our intel grasped that pretty far back and we also figured out that Iran was in the process of doing the same thing, only in the case of Iran they had
actually begun real work...they actually had the centrifuges and they were operational. We unleashed the STUXNET virus which caused the centrifuges to overspeed, which is a severe hardware damage situation. Thus we rendered Iran's centrifuges unsalvageable.

Saddam did not have centrifuges built, set up or operational so it was more like a case of "he had some limited amounts of the raw precursor and he was desperately looking for the know how, and the hardware. Constructing centrifuges in a locked off rogue state is something that attracts global attention, as does any attempt to import them, whole or in part.

But yellowcake in raw form is not a raw stock for a dirty bomb. The material just doesn't put out that much radiation in that state; it behaves in a matter similar to the raw ore, radiologically speaking.

Going from raw yellowcake to weaponized fissionable material is a thoroughly complicated, arduous and precision process in which the slightest deviation from the required recipe and enrichment steps yields either a high risk disaster on site to all involved personnel, or a total dud, a washout. You basically end up with a whole lot of very expensive dirt.

Sure, there are whiz kids who are capable of constructing a "pile" which can "go critical" but we are talking about constructing a nuclear weapon, not a pile.
Generally the kids who have successfully constructed a pile have obtained the already refined fissionable material in tiny amounts via means like stolen medical gear, research reactor fuel stockpiles, pulsed power sites, etc.

If there are any examples of an amateur refining their own yellowcake into weaponized fissionable materials please share because I don't know of any.
Not saying it can't happen, I'm saying I would be amazed that I hadn't run across it yet. So I could be wrong on this but I am not wrong on my assessment of yellowcake in its raw form. There are old photographic lenses out there with thorium coatings on them which are more dangerous than yellowcake.

Re: ISIL seizes Saddam's chemical weapons plant

cpwill said:

I don't know if I'd call 500 rounds "minute" - but then that's a subjective term. How many do you think we maintain? both of which still prove the point being made A) Saddam still had legacy WMD and B) he did not have ongoing production programs. that is correct. The 1,000 or so side-stored radioactive materials found with it were what could be used for dirty bombs - the main purpose for enriched uranium is nuclear energy, either slow and steady out of a plant, or all of a sudden out of a bomb. I don't have to counter it. It's naive idiocy is at this point rather self-apparent. I might as well suggest that Obama was deliberately lying when his administration gave us the unemployment projections for the stimulus. It's not that he was lying - it's that he was wrong, and wrong largely because he'd been informed wrongly by the experts, who themselves had good reasons for being wrong.

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More CON game- 500 rounds were UNACCOUNTED for pre-invasion, they were never 'found' post invasion. The list of found Chem weapons doesn't include some 500 rounds... :doh

Saddam didn't have legacy chem weapons, there were a few that didn't explode when the UN destroyed them in a huge pit, there were a few older shells that had been missed, a few that had been cleaned out and Faux Noise made huge stink about some the Poles found- that were empty... :shock:

But two older shells lost amidst the massive UN program isn't a legacy.

3-5% enriched isn't bomb grade material, it takes a huge effort to improve 3-5% uranium to weapons grade- Iran is taking thousands of centrifuges and years to attempt that last refinement.

You use the typical CON dodge again... the 'thousands of radioactive items' were MEDICAL/CIVILIAN isotopes- the kind found in any major city. Saddam wasn't collecting them to make dirty bombs... BushII's piss poor security after the fall put those items within the terrorist's reach.

You CAN'T counter much, and trying a CON deflection to the employment figures is pathetic. The fact is BushII lied- your feeble attempt to make 3-5% uranium 'dangerous', medical supplies into terrorist weapons, 2 atry shells into the massive stockpile Rummy could put his hands on (do note Rummy never went anywhere near where a stock pile MIGHT be)- your trying to make that into vindication for BushII's lies (and that is what you said in your first post)

NOW it is the 'experts' who knowingly lied, not BushII wanting a show down with Saddam to plant the seeds of democracy and prove a Neo-CON position paper. BushII was just a gullible fool who didn't figure out after the third claim was decisively proven to be false the whole confrontation was a snow job....

Yeah now that is a legacy for ya.... :roll:

Re: ISIL seizes Saddam's chemical weapons plant

Mr.Nick said:

It's there, it just needs to be built...

You claiming Iraq or any nation in the Mid East lacks the hardware to make a bomb?

Probably not against the US but that doesn't mean they cant use it against others in the region or use it as a bargaining chip while Michelle eats her ****ing hamburgers.

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I'm saying that you might be vastly oversimplifying and when people oversimplify the door gets opened to huge mistakes.
You said that they "found the technology" and I simply asked what you believe they found.
Saying "it just needs to be built" doesn't say anything.

I found the technology to do zero to sixty in less than one second, but it just needs to be built.
Does that mean that I have a Keith Black HEMI engine with Rootes the 8-71 blower sitting in a roller chassis that just needs the laptop and the software to adjust the fuel management or does it just mean I have a poster of Red Victor 1 on my bedroom wall?

Re: ISIL seizes Saddam's chemical weapons plant

Fenton said:

...so no reason to " seal " them right ?

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Iirc, UNSCOM sealed the places. UNSCOM ceased to be in 1999. Not sure if today's current conditions were what caused UNSCOM to have a "reason to ' seal ' them."
UNSCOM may have sealed the bunkers based on conditions at the time.
:shrug: