Only 21 days in, and the list of WMD's continues to grow. Below is a short list that Mansoor Ijaz collected. There is no case left for the anti-war crowd, their leaders have had their credibility completely destroyed. How will they salvage their reputation?
1. Weapons-grade plutonium. At the Al Tuwaitha nuclear complex, which Mohammed El Baradei's International Atomic Energy Agency inspectors declared free of unsecured nuclear materials late last year, an embedded journalist for the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review reported on Thursday that Marine battalions had detected weapons-grade plutonium. Al Tuwaitha was an Iraqi government-controlled facility run by Saddam's Atomic Energy Commission. A maze of belowground hallways leading to labs and storage facilities underscored the lengths to which Saddam's scientists had gone in order to hide their clandestine activities. And not one or two buildings, but fourteen — count them, 14 — buildings had abnormally high radiation levels, according to the US 1st Marine Division's nuclear and intelligence experts unearthing the secrets. If it is confirmed that weapons-grade plutonium exists at Tuwaitha, those who gave Saddam either the reactor technology and chemicals to reprocess spent uranium or transferred weapons-grade plutonium directly to Iraq will have a lot to answer for.
2. Biological weapons. Fox News' embedded reporter, Rick Leventhal, downloaded incredible video of what may be the first of Saddam's bioweapons labs on wheels. He reported that in a U-Haul-sized truck disguised as a radar facility for mobile surface-to-air missiles, a false panel revealed electronic pulleys, winches, storage bins, and refrigerators which could easily be used to store biological-weapons stashes (refrigeration being the key identifier because you certainly don't need refrigerators to freeze the rocket launcher). Tests will determine definitively whether there are any biological residues or not. But when a truck is found at a construction site hidden amid other trucks and construction equipment, and then tries to high tail it out of camp before it gets found out and then shot out by alert U.S. Marines, it is a sure sign that someone powerful wanted to hide this truck, and maybe its sisters, at all cost.
3. Chemical warheads. The 1st Marine Division with the 101st Airborne reports the seizure of 20 medium-range rockets armed with sarin and mustard gas that were ready to fire — not stored away, not unassembled, but ready to fire. And the amounts of chemicals found in the warheads of the BM-21 missiles left no doubt about their intended use — to kill masses of Coalition troops. These were not trace amounts.
4. Al Qaeda links. In the north, Coalition troops found paperwork early in the campaign after bombing the Sargat camp that indisputably tied the terrorists of Ansar al-Islam, a terrorist outfit funded in part by Saddam's Mukhabarat intelligence directorate and in part by Iran's SAVAK intelligence services, to al Qaeda. Sargat was operated by Abu Musab al Zarqawi, a known close associate of Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan, and was residence to over 700 terrorists, about a fourth of whom trained in bin Laden's Afghani terror camps. Zarqawi and his henchmen are now believed to be hiding in Ansar camps just on the Iranian side of the border.
5. Terror toxins. The paper trail may only be the tip of the iceberg. Mobile-lab tests conducted on boots and running shoes found in the bombed Sargat camp showed meaningful traces of Ricin and botulinum toxins. Similar trace amounts of chemical agents allegedly found in soil samples were used to justify the Clinton administration's August 1998 decision to launch cruise missile attacks on Sudan's al-Shifa pharmaceutical plant. Traces of Ricin, it might be recalled, were found in terrorist hideouts in London and Paris, and then later in Barcelona and Milan, where Algerian terrorists tied to al Qaeda and answering to Zarqawi were readying retaliation strikes against Europe's civilian populations. Ingesting miniscule amounts of Ricin, which induces respiratory failure, can kill within 72 hours. There is no known cure.
6. Salman Pak. Media outlets and U.S. officials who once had responsibility for America's national security have long ridiculed claims that Saddam had any ties to the hijackers of September 11, or that his secular identity could ever commingle with radical Islamists like bin Laden. The paperwork and presence of recipe books to mix Ricin and other toxic nerve agents, as well as traces of the agents themselves, at the Sargat camp in northern Iraq lay to rest the Saddam-bin Laden commingling issue. So did the capture of Sudanese, Egyptian, Yemeni, Syrian, and other Arabs with ties to al Qaeda fighting along Saddam's Fedayeen kamikaze forces. But the hijackers were another matter — until this weekend, when Coalition forces destroyed the Salman Pak terror camp on Sunday morning. They found an airplane shell at the Salman Pak terror camps, just like former CIA Director James Woolsey and ex-Clinton aide Laurie Mylroie had postulated repeatedly since the mid-1990s there was. Interviews conducted by PBS's Frontline in June 2002 of Sabah Khodada, a captain in the Iraqi army, indicate that he personally witnessed men of Arab descent, mainly Yemeni, with long beards training in the hull of the 707 aircraft, and on trains and buses in the same fields specifically for hijacking missions using knives and other common utensils.
