Summary: Looters Overran Iraq Arms Site (Muthanna desert complex)

[maddezmom]

By The Associated Press

THE TARGET: Muthanna desert complex where a bunker sealed by U.N. monitors held old chemical weapons.



WHO DID IT: Looters unleashed last year by the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq (news - web sites).


WHAT WAS LOOTED: All U.N.-sealed Muthanna structures were broken into. If the so-called Bunker 2 was breached and looted, it would be the second recent case of restricted weapons at risk of falling into militants' hands.


http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=540&ncid=736&e=1&u=/ap/20041030/ap_on_re_mi_ea/iraq_looted_chemical_site_summary_box

this is the summary for this article, I believe.

Looters Said to Overrun Iraq Weapons Site (Charles Duelfer's report)
~snip~
Chief arms hunter Duelfer told The Associated Press by e-mail Friday from Iraq that he was unaware of "anything of importance" looted from the chemical weapons complex. The report his Iraq Survey Group issued on Oct. 6 said, however, that it couldn't vouch for the fate of old munitions at Muthanna.


One chemical weapons expert said even old, weakened nerve agents — in this case sarin — could be a threat to unprotected civilians.


The weapons involved would be pre-1991 artillery rockets filled with sarin, or their damaged remnants — weapons that were openly declared by Iraq and were under U.N. control until security fell apart with the U.S. attack. They are not concealed arms of the kind President Bush (news - web sites) claimed Iraq had, but which were never found.


In its Oct. 6 report, summarizing a fruitless search for banned weapons in Iraq, Duelfer's group disclosed that widespread looting occurred at Muthanna, 35 miles northwest of Baghdad, in the aftermath of the fall of the Iraqi capital in April 2003.

~snip~
http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/ap/20041030/ap_on_re_mi_ea/iraq_looted_chemical_site_1

[GHOSTDANCER]

1. My question is how do you move 400 tons of anything?

I mean really what they do stuff em in there turbins? My guess is that the cabal allowed them to take the crap to use against us, See this way they can continue to manipulate the Oil prices coming out of Saudi. Just another sick part of their plan. It's right up there with never capturing Osama, or at least never releasing him, see this way we have a "Wheres Waldo" game going on across the entire Middle East. The boogie man they need to continue the plan.

[maddezmom]

5. I'd say more is missing than just the 400 tons making the new

Thousands of tons of other munitions are also unaccounted for across Iraq. The issue has become a flashpoint in the U.S. presidential race.


Buchanan said a U.N. team inspected the sealed Muthanna bunker on Dec. 4, 2002, and inspectors continued to visit Muthanna up to March 14, 2003, although they did not view the bunker that day. Four days later, on the eve of the U.S. invasion, the U.N. monitors had to leave Iraq.


As for when the sealed bunker may have been breached, the report said, "The facilities at the southern section" — the bunker area — "were removed by unknown entities between April and June 2003." It didn't elaborate, but presumably the first U.S. search teams arrived at Muthanna in June and discovered the looting.





"The (Iraq Survey Group) is unable to unambiguously determine the complete fate of old munitions, materials and chemicals produced and stored there," the Duelfer report said.

[NNN0LHI]

7. How do tiny little ants build huge ant hills?

I have heard reporters describing entire buildings, brick by brick, being taken away by looters during the frenzy after Hussein's fall.

Don

[Barrett808]

15. The Tuwaitha site was looted by amateurs and professionals

Whole buildings are gone. WaPo reported at the beginning of the year that a line of trucks miles long waited each day at a particular Jordanian junkyard to dump Iraqi "scrap." Yellow-cake contaminated scrap metal was found at Rotterdam harbor.

[skooooo]

2. "It's freedom baby, yeah!"

-- Donald Rumsfeld after fall of Baghdad.

[nothingshocksmeanymore]

3. so is this now a THIRD site?

[maddezmom]

4. the looting is reporting in the Oct. 6 report

The weapons involved would be pre-1991 artillery rockets filled with sarin, or their damaged remnants — weapons that were openly declared by Iraq and were under U.N. control until security fell apart with the U.S. attack. They are not concealed arms of the kind President Bush (news - web sites) claimed Iraq had, but which were never found.


In its Oct. 6 report, summarizing a fruitless search for banned weapons in Iraq, Duelfer's group disclosed that widespread looting occurred at Muthanna, 35 miles northwest of Baghdad, in the aftermath of the fall of the Iraqi capital in April 2003.


A little-noted annex of the 985-page report said every U.N.-sealed location at the desert installation had been breached in the looting spree, and "materials and equipment were removed."


Bunker 2 at Muthanna State Establishment, once Iraq's central chemical weapons production site, was put under U.N. inspectors' control in early 1991 after it was heavily damaged by a U.S. precision bomb in the first Gulf War (news - web sites). At the time, Iraq said 2,500 sarin-filled artillery rockets had been stored there.

[SOS]

6. Alot more than three, including bio agents

Eyewitness to a failure in Iraq
By Peter W. Galbraith  |  October 27, 2004

IN 2003 I went to tell Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz what I had seen in Baghdad in the days following Saddam Hussein's overthrow. For nearly an hour, I described the catastrophic aftermath of the invasion -- the unchecked looting of every public institution in Baghdad, the devastation of Iraq's cultural heritage, the anger of ordinary Iraqis who couldn't understand why the world's only superpower was letting this happen.

I also described two particularly disturbing incidents -- one I had witnessed and the other I had heard about. On April 16, 2003, a mob attacked and looted the Iraqi equivalent of the Centers for Disease Control, taking live HIV and black fever virus among other potentially lethal materials. US troops were stationed across the street but did not intervene because they didn't know the building was important.

http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2004/10/27/eyewitness_to_a_failure_in_iraq?mode=PF

[maddezmom]

8. were our troops left in the dark about all the hazards on purpose??

really, what were the troops orders? WE go to war for WMD's but our troops don't even know where they "supposed" to be located??
God, help them and all the Iraq's......who knows what they will be coming down with in the days, months and years to come. :eyes:

[VegasWolf]

9. By God, the oil sites were guarded though! n/t

New Information Shows Bush Indecisive, Paranoid, Delusional

[maddezmom]

10. but it would seem, we can't even guard the pipelines and facilites anymore

everyday or so there is a report of a bombing :eyes:

[OutsourceBush]

11. So Bush armed the insurgents quite well

real smart

[maddezmom]

12. perhaps part of the non-plan...never ending war in Iraq

:shrug:

[no safe haven]

13. Bingo!

Remember last May, shells from a roadside bomb were found to contain traces of sarin? Faux toted this news out for about a day that it was *proof* of Saddam’s WMDs, until it was found to be weakened sarin from Iraq War I stock. I thought at the time the story disappeared off the radar a bit too quickly.

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,120137,00.html

http://www.news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/3722855.stm

This should leave no doubt that insurgents have been using looted ammunition against US troops. Such gross negligence and/or incompetence on such a large scale does not even bear mentioning. Obviously a cover-up since at least May :tinfoilhat:.

[maddezmom]

14. WaPo running article today

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=102x952476