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6/26/2003

WMD Update: Found 'Em
We found nuclear bomb-making equipment, documentation of Iraq's plans for hiding banned weapons and related information from UN inspectors, and, uh, castor beans, from which the deadly bio-weapon Ricin is made. Byron York explains in excruciating detail how the Left's "Bush Lied About the WMDs" meme is crumbling fast.

Meanwhile, a few facts about ricin. It is:

five times deadlier than VX nerve gas, 6,000 times more poisonous than cyanide and 12,000 times more poisonous than rattlesnake venom. ... A virtually invisible speck produces irreversible pneumonia-like symptoms and kills within days; there is no antidote. A pound of ricin dumped in a city's water supply or blown around in the ventilation system of an indoor Super Bowl arena would not be a good thing.
It is made from the bean of the Castor Oil Plant, Ricinus communis. The Castor Oil plant is a native of India, and grows best in tropical latitudes. It is grown in the Azores and the warmer Mediterranean countries - Algeria, Egypt, Greece and the Riviera - and in France, and in the United States.

Iraq was working on ricin. Here are some details from the March 22, U.S. News:
Only days before the airstrikes on Iraq began, French police uncovered two vials containing the deadly toxin ricin in a baggage locker at a Paris train station. The discovery triggered fears of bioterrorism on both sides of the English Channel, because in January British police found ricin in a London flat occupied by several Islamic militants. The militants were arrested on terrorist charges.

Ricin – a natural product of the age-old and ubiquitous castor plant famous for its castor oil – is not on the A list of weapons of mass destruction, as tabulated by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. It is not infectious, and mass dispersal requires that the solid extract be milled into a fine powder–difficult for amateurs. Nonetheless, ricin has been one of Saddam Hussein's favorites. In the 1990s, United Nations inspectors uncovered a decade-long drive to grow and process castor beans for what Iraqi scientists belatedly acknowledged was for Iraq's weapons arsenal. The country's ricin stashes remain unaccounted for.
Iraq had a state-owned Saddam had a Castor Oil Production Plant in Fallujah, Iraq, according to this CBC News report. Here's some more info on the Fallujah plant from GlobalSecurity.org, which says Iraq admitted to UNSCOM that it manufactured ricin and field-tested it in artillery shells before the Gulf war. Iraq operated this plant for legitimate purposes under UNSCOM scrutiny before 1998 when UN inspectors left the country. Since 1999, Iraq has rebuilt major structures destroyed during Operation Desert Fox. Iraqi officials claim they are making castor oil for brake fluid, but verifying such claims without UN inspections is impossible.

That;s the crux of it, isn't it? Verifying Iraq's claims without UN inspections was impossible - and trusting them without verification was potentially deadly to tens of thousands or even millions of Americans in the new post-September 11 world. We couldn't trust Saddam - and couldn't trust him to not give a liter of ricin to an al Qaeda operative headed for London, or New York. He wouldn't cooperate with the inspectors - a breach of his responsibilities under UN Res. 1441 and a slew of previous resolutions. So we had to kick down the door and go in and verify. Which is what we're doing. And we're finding that Saddam was not to be trusted.

Now to today's news, from MSNBC: The sources said U.S. troops also discovered about 300 sacks of castor beans, which are used to make the deadly biological agent ricin, hidden in a warehouse in the town of al-Aziziyah, 50 miles southeast of Baghdad, the capital. The castor beans were inaccurately labeled as fertilizer.

Fallujah, of course, has emerged as the center of resistance from the remnants of and supporters of Saddam's regime. A majority Sunni muslim town, Fallujah "benefited greatly from industrial projects under Saddam Hussein," reports the Washington Times. Projects like the ricin plant, of course. Meanwhile, there's growing evidence that Saudi extremists of the Wahhabi sect of Islam - theologically akin to al Qaeda and aligned with al-Qaeda's geopolitical goals - are meddling in Fallujah in order to foment anti-American violence.

In 1997, U.N. inspectors found Iraq had produced and weaponized at least 10 liters of ricin, enough to kill more than 1 million people. Saddam's regime claimed it used all of the ricin in field trials of ricin-loaded artillery shells, but there's no documentation or proof of the claim. 300 bags of Castor beans hidden in a warehouse disguised as fertilizer - Saddam wasn't preparing to restart his ricin plant over in Fallujah at some point, was he?

Folks, this is how we'll find the WMDs. A box here, a bag there, a small cache of bio-weapons precursors hidden in a non-descript warehouse in mislabeled bags, parts for making nuclear bombs buried under a scientist's rose garden, or stashed behind a false wall in a closet. We're not going to find a giant auto-plant-sized manufacturing facility. We're not going to find bombs and cases of anthrax vials and drums of VX stacked on the street corner in Baghdad or waiting for us in a public square in Tikrit, next to a billboard that says "Saddam's WMDs."

We are going to find them - and find evidence of Saddam's serial breaching of the UN resolutions - a piece at a time. And, for the anti-war crowd who have taken to crowing about the alleged lack of WMDs (and trying to find ways to explain away anything we find), it's going to be like Chinese water torture.

UPDATE: Michael Williams over at Master of None agrees that "finding WMD in Iraq will be a constant trickle, not a flood," and says "it's unlikely that Saddam dug a single giant hole and threw everything in." Yeah. The notion of a single giant hole is, uh, silly.

UPDATE: A blogger not worth linking to accepts the notion that Saddam's Castor Oil Plant was for making Castor Oil, even though Saddam told the UN he made ricin there - and even though the Clinton administration on Operation Desert Fox bombed the plant as a suspected weapons of mass production facility. Of course, the aforementioned blogger probably thought that Baby Milk Factory really was a baby milk factory, just because Saddam and his useful idiot Peter Arnett said it was even though, as as the WaPo reports, "Intelligence analysts had identified the eight-year-old plant as one of 13 biological weapons sites. The four-acre compound had a pronounced military appearance, particularly buildings painted in camouflage colors, surrounded by fence and guard posts." (We now know it was a chemical/biological weapons factory.)

The blogger also says I in my post above "cite the famous aluminum tubes that Iraq tried to purchase but could not." I'm still trying to find where I did that. And he derides the finding of a large cache of documents from Saddam's weapons program as "two containers full of old documents," and says the hiding the regime's banned weapons programs from the UN - as indicated by the document from 2001 - was not a good reason "to bomb Iraq."

Well...it was for the Clinton administration.

More importantly, in the post-September 11 world, only a crazy person would think it wise to risk the safety of all Americans on the notion that Saddam could be trusted, and that inspections could work. As I said above, the finds of the hidden parts of making nuclear bombs, and the mislabled an hidden ingredient for ricin shows that verifying Iraq's claims without UN inspections was impossible - and trusting them without verification was potentially deadly to tens of thousands or even millions of Americans, should Saddam decide to give a liter of ricin to an al Qaeda operative headed for London, or New York - or, one day, provide them with a bomb.. Saddam - not the US and not the UN - had the responsibility to prove he was WMD-free. He instead worked very hard to convince the world he was hiding something. He left us no choice.