Reply #4: the looting is reporting in the Oct. 6 report

[maddezmom]

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.