"That's right, I said it.": For the record, WMDs were there...

With the hope that we wouldn't have to revisit this issue because WMDs were in use again, here's a compilation of links (listed in chronological order) that show, concerning the Global War On Terror, WMDs did exist. #WMDinIraq #WMDs #WMD

NOTE: Updated with the New York Times article ‘The Secret Casualties of Iraq’s Abandoned Chemical Weapons’ published 14OCT2014 (see below).

January 2003... UN inspectors conduct analysis of 12th chemical warhead found in Iraq -- Quoting: United Nations weapons inspectors returned to the Ukhaider Ammunition Storage Area today to conduct further analysis of the twelfth chemical warhead found at the site earlier in the week. “The team took additional samples from the warhead and resealed the warhead and the storage building,” said Hiro Ueki, spokesman for the UN Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission (UNMOVIC) and International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) in Baghdad.
http://www.un.org/apps/news/story.asp?NewsID=5917

July 2003... Key Judgments from the National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on Iraq's Continuing Programs for Weapons of Mass Destruction
http://www.fas.org/irp/cia/product/iraq-wmd.html

August 2003... Ex-spy fingers Russians on WMD -- Quoting: The Soviet bloc not only sold Saddam its WMDs, but it showed them how to make them “disappear.” Russia is still at it. Primakov was in Baghdad from December until a couple of days before the war, along with a team of Russian military experts led by two of Russia’s topnotch “retired” generals,Vladislav Achalov, a former deputy defense minister, and Igor Maltsev, a former air defense chief of staff. They were all there receiving honorary medals from the Iraqi defense minister.
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2003/aug/20/20030820-081256-6822r/?page=all#pagebreak

October 2003... Syria said to have Iraq arms -- Quoting: The director of a top U.S. spy agency said Tuesday that he believes that material from Iraq’s illicit weapons program had been transported into Syria and perhaps other countries as part of an effort by the Iraqis to disperse and destroy evidence immediately before the recent war. The official, James Clapper Jr., a retired lieutenant general, said SATELLITE IMAGERY [my emphasis] showing a heavy flow of traffic from Iraq into Syria, just before the U.S. invasion in March, led him to believe that illicit weapons material “unquestionably” had been moved out of Iraq.
http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2003-10-29/news/0310290219_1_illicit-weapons-clapper-weapons-inspector
Note: James Clapper now serves as Director of National Intelligence (DNI) in the Obama Administration.

May 2004... Washington Post: Deadly Nerve Agent Sarin Is Found in Roadside Bomb
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A33082-2004May17.html

May 2004... The Struggle for Iraq: Nuclear Materials; U.S. Announces It Intends to Move Tons of Uranium From Sealed Baghdad Repository -- New York Times: The United States has informed an international agency that oversees nuclear materials that it intends to move hundreds of tons of uranium from a sealed repository south of Baghdad to a more secure place outside Iraq, Western diplomats close to the agency say. “The repository, at Tuwaitha, a centerpiece of Saddam Hussein’s nuclear weapons program… holds more than 500 tons of uranium… some 1.8 tons is classified as low-enriched uranium…” Thomas B. Cochran, director of the nuclear program at the Natural Resources Defense Council, said the low-enriched version could be useful to a nation with nuclear ambitions. “A country like Iran,” Cochran said, “could convert that into weapons-grade material with a lot fewer centrifuges than would be required with natural uranium.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/22/world/struggle-for-iraq-nuclear-materials-us-announces-it-intends-move-tons-uranium.html
and
http://www.utsandiego.com/uniontrib/20040522/news_1n22uranium.html

July 2004... Warheads with mustard, sarin gas found by Polish troops in Iraq
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/040701203743.9i07uh3m.html

October 2004... Quoting: George W. Bush had good reason to go to war in Iraq and end the regime of Saddam Hussein. First of all, Saddam retained the capability to manufacture weapons of mass destruction. On chemical weapons, “Saddam sought to sustain the requisite knowledge base to restart the program eventually and, to the extent it did not threaten the Iraqi efforts to get out from under sanctions, to sustain the inherent capability to produce such weapons as circumstances permitted in the future.” On nuclear weapons, “Saddam did not abandon his nuclear ambitions. … Those around Saddam seemed quite convinced that once sanctions were ended, and all other things being equal, Saddam would renew his efforts in this field.” Moreover, Duelfer concluded that Saddam in his missile program was developing missiles that exceeded the range limits set in U.N. Security Council Resolution 687. … We were facing a brutal dictator with the capability to develop WMDs and the proven willingness to use them. A dictator whose regime had had, as the 9/11 Commission has documented, frequent contacts with al Qaeda.
http://www.usnews.com/usnews/opinion/baroneweb/mb_041008.htm
Back up link: http://www.siliconinvestor.com/readmsg.aspx?msgid=20643921

October 2004... Russia tied to Iraq’s missing arms -- Quoting: Russian special forces troops moved many of Saddam Hussein’s weapons and related goods out of Iraq and into Syria in the weeks before the March 2003 U.S. military operation. … Regarding the explosives, the new Iraqi government reported that 194.7 metric tons of HMX, or high-melting-point explosive, and 141.2 metric tons of RDX, or rapid-detonation explosive, and 5.8 metric tons of PETN, or pentaerythritol tetranitrate, were missing. The material is used in nuclear weapons and also in making military “plastic” high explosive.
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2004/oct/28/20041028-122637-6257r/?page=all

September 2005... Syria after Lebanon: The Growing Syrian Missile Threat -- Quoting: Several different intelligence sources raised red flags about suspicious truck convoys from Iraq to Syria in the days, weeks, and months prior to the March 2003 invasion of Iraq. These concerns first became public when, on December 23, 2002, Ariel Sharon stated on Israeli television, “Chemical and biological weapons which Saddam is endeavoring to conceal have been moved from Iraq to Syria.” … The U.S., British, and Australian governments issued similar statements.
http://www.meforum.org/755/syria-after-lebanon-the-growing-syrian-missile

November 2005... Who Is Lying About Iraq? Quoting: In the National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) of 2002, where their collective views were summarized, one of the conclusions offered with “high confidence” was that “Iraq is continuing, and in some areas expanding its chemical, biological, nuclear, and missile programs contrary to UN resolutions.” The intelligence agencies of Britain, Germany, Russia, China, Israel, and—yes—France all agreed with this judgment. And even Hans Blix—who headed the UN team of inspectors trying to determine whether Saddam had complied with the demands of the Security Council that he get rid of the weapons of mass destruction he was known to have had in the past—lent further credibility to the case in a report he issued only a few months before the invasion… “the consensus of the intelligence community,” as [Lawrence] Wilkerson puts it, “was overwhelming” in the period leading up to the invasion of Iraq that Saddam definitely had an arsenal of chemical and biological weapons, and that he was also in all probability well on the way to rebuilding the nuclear capability that the Israelis had damaged by bombing the Osirak reactor in 1981. … Additional confirmation of this latter point comes from Kenneth Pollack, who served in the National Security Council under Clinton. “In the late spring of 2002,” Pollack has written, “I participated in a Washington meeting about Iraqi WMD. Those present included nearly twenty former inspectors from the United Nations Special Commission (UNSCOM), the force established in 1991 to oversee the elimination of WMD in Iraq. One of the senior people put a question to the group: did anyone in the room doubt that Iraq was currently operating a secret centrifuge plant? No one did. Three people added that they believed Iraq was also operating a secret calutron plant (a facility for separating uranium isotopes).” … So, too, the Washington Post, which greeted the inauguration of George W. Bush in January 2001 with the admonition that “[o]f all the booby traps left behind by the Clinton administration, none is more dangerous—or more urgent—than the situation in Iraq. Over the last year, Mr. Clinton and his team quietly avoided dealing with, or calling attention to, the almost complete unraveling of a decade’s efforts to isolate the regime of Saddam Hussein and prevent it from rebuilding its weapons of mass destruction. That leaves President Bush to confront a dismaying panorama in the Persian Gulf [where] intelligence photos . . . show the reconstruction of factories long suspected of producing chemical and biological weapons.”
http://archive.frontpagemag.com/readArticle.aspx?ARTID=6635

January 2006... Quoting: Two Iraqi Airways Boeings were converted to cargo planes by removing the seats… special Republican Guard brigades loaded materials onto the planes, including “yellow barrels with skull and crossbones on each barrel.” There was also a ground convoy of trucks. The flights -- 56 in total -- attracted little notice because they were thought to be civilian flights providing relief from Iraq to Syria, which had suffered a flood after a dam collapse in June of 2002.
http://www.nysun.com/foreign/iraqs-wmd-secreted-in-syria-sada-says/26514/

June 2006... Declassified memorandum from the Director of National Intelligence (DNI) on the approximately 500 chemical munitions recovered in Iraq
http://www.foxnews.com/projects/pdf/Iraq_WMD_Declassified.pdf

November 2007... Shattering Conventional Wisdom About Saddam's WMDs -- Quoting: Debkafile…has recently published a report claiming that the Syrians were importing North Korean plutonium to be mixed with Saddam’s enriched uranium. Allegedly, the Syrians were close to completing a warhead factory next to Saddam’s WMD dump in Deir al Zour, Syria to produce hundreds, if not thousands, of super toxic “dirty bombs” that would pollute wherever they landed in Israel for the next several thousands of years. Debka alleged that it was this combination factory/WMD dump site which was the target of the recent Israeli air strike in Deir al Zour province. … Saddam’s secret files certainly make a persuasive case of massive WMD acquisition right up to a few months before the war. Not only was he buying banned precursors for nerve gas, he was ordering the chemicals to make Zyklon B, the Nazis favorite gas at Auschwitz. … We know from Saddam’s documents that huge quantities of CW and BW were in fact produced, and there is no record of their destruction. But absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. Therefore, at least as to chemical and biological weapons, the evidence is compelling, but not conclusive. There is no one individual document or audiotape that contains a smoking gun. There is no ambiguity, however, about captured tape ISGQ-2003-M0007379, in which Saddam is briefed on his secret nuclear weapons project. This meeting clearly took place in 2002 or afterwards: almost a decade after the State Department claimed that Saddam had abandoned his nuclear weapons research. Moreover the tape describes a laser enrichment process for uranium that had never been known by the UN inspectors to even exist in Iraq, and Saddam’s nuclear briefers on the tape were Iraqi scientists who had never been on any weapons inspector’s list. The tape explicitly discusses how civilian plasma research could be used as a cover for military plasma research necessary to build a hydrogen bomb. … Iraqi informants showed US investigators where Saddam had constructed huge underwater storage facilities beneath the Euphrates River. The tunnel entrances were still sealed with tons of concrete. The US investigators who approached the sealed entrances were later determined to have been exposed to radiation.
http://archive.frontpagemag.com/readArticle.aspx?ARTID=28874

June 2008... Andrew C. McCarthy: Treachery -- The Senate Intelligence Committee's report on prewar statements is a disgrace.
http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/224751/treachery/andrew-c-mccarthy

July 2008... MSNBC: Secret U.S. mission hauls uranium from Iraq -- LAST [my emphasis] major stockpile from Saddam’s nuclear efforts arrives in Canada -- Quoting: The last major remnant of Saddam Hussein’s nuclear program — a huge stockpile of concentrated natural uranium — reached a Canadian port Saturday to complete a secret U.S. operation that included a two-week airlift from Baghdad and a ship voyage crossing two oceans. The removal of 550 metric tons of “yellowcake” — the seed material for higher-grade nuclear enrichment — was a significant step toward closing the books on Saddam’s nuclear legacy. It also brought relief to U.S. and Iraqi authorities who had worried the cache would reach insurgents or smugglers crossing to Iran to aid its nuclear ambitions.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/25546334/

October 2010... US DID find Iraq WMDs
http://www.nypost.com/p/news/international/us_did_find_iraq_wmd_AYiLgNbw7pDf7AZ3RO9qnM

October 2010... WikiLeaks Show WMD Hunt Continued in Iraq With Surprising Results -- Quoting: WikiLeaks’ newly-released Iraq war documents reveal that for years afterward, U.S. troops continued to find chemical weapons labs, encounter insurgent specialists in toxins and uncover weapons of mass destruction.
http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2010/10/wikileaks-show-wmd-hunt-continued-in-iraq-with-surprising-results/

February 2012... Exclusive: Obama State Department quietly warning region on Syrian WMDs
http://thecable.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2012/02/24/exclusive_state_department_quietly_warning_region_on_syrian_wmds

July 2012... Syria’s Chemical Weapons Came From Saddam’s Iraq -- Quoting: As the regime of Bashar Assad disintegrates, the security of his chemical arsenal is in jeopardy. The No. 2 general in Saddam Hussein’s air force says they were the WMDs we didn't find in Iraq. King Abdullah of neighboring Jordan warned that a disintegrating Syria on the verge of civil war puts Syria’s stockpile of chemical weapons at risk of falling into the hands of al-Qaida.
http://news.investors.com/ibd-editorials/071912-618875-syria-chemical-weapons-came-from-iraq-.htm?p=full

July 2012... Syria’s Next Act: With the rebels moving deeper into Damascus, and the regime’s days appearing numbered, the CIA is racing to find Syria’s chemical and biological weapons before it’s too late. Eli Lake reports: Obama administration officials tell The Daily Beast that the CIA has sent officers to the region to assess Syria’s weapons program. One major task for the CIA right now is to work with military defectors to find out as much information on Syria’s weapons of mass destruction, according to one U.S. official with access to Syrian intelligence. Another focus will be to sort through reams of intercepted phone calls and emails, satellite images, and other collected intelligence to find the exact locations of the Syrian weapons, this official said. … Also unclear is what, if anything, Iraq transferred to Syria before the 2003 U.S. invasion. “That is the wild card.”
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2012/07/19/syria-s-next-act.html

UPDATE: October 2014... An excerpt from ‘The Secret Casualties of Iraq’s Abandoned Chemical Weapons’:

[Quoting] From 2004 to 2011, American and American-trained Iraqi troops repeatedly encountered, and on at least six occasions were wounded by, chemical weapons remaining from years earlier in Saddam Hussein’s rule.

In all, American troops secretly reported finding roughly 5,000 chemical warheads, shells or aviation bombs, according to interviews with dozens of participants, Iraqi and American officials, and heavily redacted intelligence documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act. [End quote]