U.S. military fears nerve gas in Fallujah (and why)

I'm watching CNN which is reporting that Marines surrounding the city have been issued gas masks, because "U.S.  intelligence officials believe there is a risk that insurgents in Fallujah have a small amount of nerve gas agent."

Geez, I wonder where the guerrillas might have picked that stuff up?

Oh wait, here's last Saturday's NYT (page 12):

Looters overran an Iraqi complex last year where a bunker holding old chemical weapons was sealed by United Nations monitors, American arms inspectors have reported.

[...]

Bunker 2 at Muthanna State Establishment, once Iraq's central chemical weapons production site, was put under the control of the United Nations in early 1991 after it was damaged by an American bomb in the Persian Gulf war. At the time, Iraq said 2,500 sarin-filled artillery rockets had been stored there.

One chemical weapons expert said even old, weakened nerve agents - in this case sarin - could be a threat to unprotected civilians.

P.S.  A sarin-filled shell hit a U.S. convoy back in May.  The stuff was apparently so old it didn't have much effect.

Comments

[DrSteve]

A quick correction for you: The IED containing Sarin that was used against the convoy back in the Spring was largely ineffective not because the Sarin was old, but because it was a binary mix-in-flight munition that wasn't properly detonated (rotation from barrel rifling breaks a membrane between the components and they mix together to create *fresh* Sarin). Only small amounts of the binary components (which have longer shelf lives than Sarin) mixed as a result.

[e-Hadj]

But I thought Iraq had no WMD stockpiles? Why wasn't this reported? It would have made the case for war a lot stronger. Bush & Co can't even lie effectively!