Wikileaks: WMD program existed in Iraq prior to US invasion

A report from 2006 claims ?neuroparalytic? chemical weapons from Iran were smuggled into Iraq.

According to the latest WikiLeaks document "dump," Saddam’s toxic arsenal, significantly reduced after the Gulf War, remained intact. Jihadists, insurgents and foreign (possibly Iranian) agitators turned to these stockpiles during the Iraq conflict and may have brewed up their own deadly agents, according to the WikiLeaks web site.

During that time, former Iraqi General Georges Sada, Saddam's top commander, detailed the transfers of Iraq's WMD. "There [were] weapons of mass destruction gone out from Iraq to Syria, and they must be found and returned to safe hands," Mr. Sada said. "I am confident they were taken over."

Gen. Sada's comments came just a month after Israel's top general during Operation Iraqi Freedom, Moshe Yaalon, claimed that Saddam Hussein "transferred the chemical agents from Iraq to Syria."

On May 27, 2003, a secret Defense Intelligence Agency fact-finding mission in Iraq reported unanimously to intelligence officials in Washington that two trailers captured in Iraq by Kurdish troops "had nothing to do with biological weapons." The trailers had been a key part of the argument for the 2003 invasion; Secretary of State Colin Powell had told the United Nations Security Council, "We have firsthand descriptions of biological weapons factories on wheels and on rails.

In a speech before the World Affairs Council of Charlotte, NC, on April 7, 2006, President Bush stated that he "fully understood that the intelligence was wrong, and [he was] just as disappointed as everybody else" when U.S. troops failed to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.[86]

Since the 2003 invasion of Iraq, several reported finds of chemical weapons were announced. During the invasion itself, there were half a dozen incidents in which the U.S. military announced that it had found chemical weapons. Some cases resulted in field tests showing false-positives.
A post-war case occurred on January 9, 2004, when Icelandic munitions experts and Danish military engineers discovered 36 120-mm mortar rounds containing liquid buried in Southern Iraq. While initial tests suggested that the rounds contained a blister agent, a chemical weapon banned by the Geneva Convention,[citation needed] subsequent analysis by American and Danish experts showed that no chemical agent was present.[107] It appears that the rounds have been buried, and most probably forgotten, since the Iran?Iraq War. Some of the munitions were in an advanced state of decay and most of the weaponry would likely have been unusable.
A 7 pound block of cyanide salt was discovered by U.S. military in safe-house for Abu Musab Zarqawi, an al-Qaeda affiliated terrorist residing in Iraq since prior the U.S. invasion.[108] The poison block was discovered in a raid of the safe-house on January 23 of 2003.[109]
Demetrius Perricos, then head of UNMOVIC, stated that the Kay report contained little information not already known by UNMOVIC.[110] Many organizations, such as the journal Biosecurity and Bioterrorism, have claimed that Kay's report is a "worst case analysis"[111]
Beginning in 2003, the ISG had uncovered remnants of Iraq's 1980s-era WMD programs. On June 21, 2006 Rick Santorum claimed that "we have found weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, chemical weapons", citing a declassified June 6 letter to Pete Hoekstra saying that since the 2003 invasion, a total of "approximately 500 weapons munitions which contain degraded mustard or sarin nerve agent" had been found scattered throughout the country.[112][113]
The Washington Post reported that "the U.S. military announced in 2004 in Iraq that several crates of the old shells had been uncovered and that they contained a blister agent that was no longer active." It said the shells "had been buried near the Iranian border, and then long forgotten, by Iraqi troops during their eight-year war with Iran, which ended in 1988."[114]
On July 2008, 550 metric tonnes of "yellowcake" the last major remnant of Saddam Hussein's nuclear program, a huge stockpile of concentrated natural uranium, arrived in Montreal as part of a top-secret U.S. operation. This transport of the seed material for higher-grade nuclear enrichment, included a two-week airlift from Baghdad and a voyage across two oceans. The Iraqi government sold the yellowcake to a Canadian uranium producer, Cameco Corp., in a transaction the official described as worth "tens of millions of dollars."[115]

The case for removing Saddam Hussein from power just got due to an unlikely source: Wikileaks. Newly-released files about detainees held in Guantanamo Bay identify two individuals who served as liaisons between Saddam Hussein?s regime and the Taliban and Al-Qaeda.
A leaked file says that Jawad Jabber Sadkhan, an Iraqi intelligence officer who moved to Afghanistan in 1998, ?admittedly forged official documents and reportedly provided liaison between the governments of Afghanistan and Iraq.? The government of Afghanistan at that time was the Taliban, which employed him as a vicious interrogator for its intelligence service. His driver said he was also close to Osama Bin Laden, who paid him before and after the 9/11 attacks. Another detainee revealed that Sadkhan would travel to Iraq through Iran to retrieve supplies for the Taliban. Sadkhan was not universally popular, as his superior, Abdul-Hadi al-Iraqi, warned Saif al-Adel in November 1998 that he was part of a group of Iraqis ?involved in un-Islamic activities.? This accusation did not end the relationship.
According to another detainee named Abbas Habid Rumi al-Naely, Sadkhan was a member of one of Saddam Hussein?s top units tasked with assassinating political opponents. The U.S. government also identified al-Naely as a liaison between Saddam Hussein?s regime and Al-Qaeda. He joined the Taliban in 1994 while living in Baghdad. One U.S. government memo shows he was accused of preparing attacks on the U.S. and British embassies in Pakistan in August 1998 with an Iraqi intelligence officer on the orders of Osama Bin Laden. Later memos did not include the charge.