SWEDISH PAPERS ARE REPORTING a WMD discovery. Is it true? Beats me. There’s more here.

There’s also this report originally from The Times (but you need a subscription to read it there):

London – David Kelly, the British weapons expert at the centre of the Iraq dossier row, had amassed firm evidence to show that Saddam Hussein built and tested a “dirty bomb.”

Designed to cause cancer and birth defects, the radiological weapon could have been used by terrorists to create panic and widespread contamination in a crowded city.

Kelly, who committed suicide last month, presented evidence of the bomb to the government in 1995 and recommended to Foreign Office officials that it feature in the government’s intelligence dossier on Iraq. However, despite secret Iraqi documents being produced to prove its existence, it was not included. . . .

Iraq’s dirty bomb was made from a material called radioactive zirconium which was packed into a bomb casing with high explosives. Iraq had access to zirconium stored at its Al-Tarmiya reactor site – under United Nations safeguards – ostensibly for use in its peaceful nuclear power program.

Interesting. My goodness, it would certainly undercut the credibility of an awful lot of the Bush Administration’s critics if this sort of information turned out to be true, wouldn’t it? I’ve been skeptical of those who have theorized that the Administration was holding back on this stuff so as to draw its critics out and then embarrass them, but this makes me wonder. And how very convenient, to have it come out via the Swedes. . . .

Meanwhile, in a somewhat-related issue, here’s a report of Al Qaeda connections to the ongoing attacks in Iraq.

UPDATE: A couple of readers say that zirconium is an unlikely candidate for a dirty bomb. I don’t know. But I did find this CNN transcript:

MCEDWARDS: And what about what we hear called a dirty bomb?

DUELFER: Iraq acknowledged to us in 1995 that [in] fact they had designed and tested what is called, popularly, a dirty bomb, which is essentially a conventional explosion, but designed to spread radioactive material. We reported this in some detail in December 1995. The material which they were using them was zirconium.

Interesting. That’s Charles Duelfer, deputy UNSCOM chairman. He’s supposed to know about that stuff, right? On the other hand, this transcript is from 2002, which makes the story old news, to the extent that it was news back then.