Josh Marshall’s lighthearted headline read, “Iraqi WMD Finally Found! Democrats in Disgrace.” He added, “It’s been more than four years since the invasion of Iraq. And countless wingers have lost their sanity and dignity over the failed hunt from Iraqi stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction. But vials of Iraqi WMD have now been found … in the inspectors’ file cabinets at the UN in New York.”
One suspects this probably isn’t what conservatives had in mind.
U.N. weapons inspectors discovered a potentially hazardous chemical warfare agent that was taken from an Iraqi chemical weapons facility 11 years ago and mistakenly stored in their offices in the heart of midtown Manhattan all that time, officials said Thursday.
The material, identified in inventory files as phosgene — a chemical substance used in World War I weapons — was discovered Aug. 24. It was only identified on Wednesday because it was marked simply with an inventory number, and officials had to check the many records in their vast archives, said Ewen Buchanan, a spokesman for the U.N. inspection agency.
A team of hazardous materials experts from the FBI and the New York City police went to the office on Manhattan’s east side, about a block north of U.N. headquarters, on Thursday with two steel containers to remove the materials and take them to a military facility outside New York for disposal, officials said.
While the disposal team was in UNMOVIC’s sixth-floor office, its small staff was evacuated along with other tenants from that floor, Buchanan said.
This seems to have largely been precautionary. CNN was running a headline earlier that read, “Suspected poison gas found at U.N.” Given the circumstances, that was probably a little overdramatic — this wasn’t any kind of attack; they were misplaced vials. (ABC News has an even more detailed report.)
Just thought I’d pass this info along in case you heard about high-drama at the U.N. today.