how much longer will it last
the pictures are even worse that they put up on yahoo photos....
read till the end..bet ya didnt know there are lethal chemicals out there for sure....
A banner for Tawhid and Jihad--the name of al-Zarqawi's organization until he changed it last month to Al Qaeda in Iraq (news - web sites)--was recovered Saturday from the home, as were several black face masks, volumes of documents, handcuffs and two long, apparently blood-stained knives, military officials said.
On Sunday, a somber patrol of Marine officers visited the squalid two-story house on the edge of a dirt field in southern Fallujah.
The site is among nearly 20 found in Fallujah where insurgent atrocities are believed to have been committed. Maj. Jim West, intelligence officer for the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force, said Sunday that some of the sites appear to have been used to hold Western hostages and others to torture or kill local people who disobeyed insurgents.
The Marine patrol also visited a second site Sunday that might have been another hostage holding area, this one in a building that contained a wire cage large enough for a human that had an intravenous bag beside it, as well as windowless, dungeon-like rooms, one of which had bloody fingerprints inside.
The Sunni Triangle city was invaded by U.S. and Iraqi forces Nov. 8 in an effort to cripple an insurgency that has beheaded foreign hostages and waged a campaign of bombings and assassinations.
`It all just came out'
U.S. intelligence officials said they were led to the house with the banner for al-Zarqawi's group on Friday by a man claiming to have escaped imprisonment there.
"He started talking, and it all just came out," said Capt. Raymond Pemberton, the intelligence officer for the 2nd Battalion, 2nd Infantry Regiment of the Army's 1st Infantry Division. The unit had been attached to the Marine Corps' 7th Regiment during the battle for Fallujah.
After viewing the house, speaking to Iraqi troops in the area and interviewing the informant, intelligence sources said they believed Arab and Western hostages had been held in the home, perhaps including British hostage Kenneth Bigley, who was beheaded in early October.
As the Marine officers visited the two houses Sunday, accompanied by a few reporters, they carried maps, documents and photographs that itemized materials found in earlier inspections.
While intermittent gunfire rattled nearby and the occasional thunder of arms caches being destroyed by American forces could be heard, the group viewed the homes in jaw-clenched silence.
The house most closely linked to al-Zarqawi, which contained the Tawhid and Jihad banner, is the last in a jumble of four homes in a neighborhood where Fallujah melts into the desert.
Three empty bottles of whiskey were dropped beside the front walk, and a pair of the type of black gym shoes worn by many insurgents was in the doorway beside a black ski mask.
Inside, a black banner bearing Arabic writing was taken off a wall in an empty room. Translated, it read "There is no God but God" and "The Organization of Tawhid and Jihad."
In the darkened hallway beside the empty room was a stained area where the informant told U.S. forces that captives had been tortured, said Maj. Lawrence Hussey, intelligence officer for the 7th Marine Regiment.
Thick nails protruded from the wall. A dirty black mask with holes cut for the eyes and mouth was on the floor beneath the stairs Sunday.
Mattresses and blankets
In a room to one side, there were torn mattresses and scattered blankets where intelligence officials believe insurgents had slept.
The informant told U.S. forces that the two rooms across the hall had been used to hold hostages. In one of them, seven more black masks, two British-made bulletproof vests, a pair of handcuffs and two AK-47 assault rifles were found.
In several of the videotaped beheadings of hostages, terrorists are seen wearing similar clothing, standing in front of a banner identical to the one torn off the wall of the house.
In addition to the knives found in the house, three cell phones and three ID cards--one for an Iraqi citizen and two for employees of an American contractor working in Iraq--were recovered.
There was a steel bar bolted into the bathroom wall. A chain dangled from it.
Holes through the walls connected the home to the three adjoining houses north of it, one of which the Marines identified as a chemistry lab and bombmaking factory.
Lethal ingredients
On a counter in the apparent bomb factory were a disassembled hand grenade, rubber gloves and numerous bottles of chemicals.
"This one says potassium cyanide," said an Egyptian translator employed by the Marines. At that point Sunday afternoon, he was the only one who could talk.
Sodium cyanide, he continued reading. Sulfuric acid. Hydrochloric acid.
Eventually, Chief Warrant Officer Lee Fair, of the 1st Battalion, 8th Marines, said quietly, "Anyone that knew what they were doing could put these things together and make something very dangerous. Looks like [in the next room] they were trying to put crude weapons together."
In that room, a hooded gas mask lay beside a large glass box, as did gloves, a carton of blasting caps and beakers full of chemicals. The floor was littered with broken glass and concrete chips blown out of the walls during the attack.
Earlier in the day, the team had visited a site farther north, a low H-shaped building first investigated by attacking Marines who spent the night in a building across the street.
In a dim room at the back of the building's courtyard, a cage was tucked into a corner, cobbled together from rusted bits of wire, chicken coops, broken crates and twist ties. It was tall enough for a person to stand in.
Beside it, investigators found a discarded IV bag on the stone floor, beside two rotting grass mattresses. Marine Lt. John Flanagan, an Arabic linguist, said a fluorescent light was found in the cage.
Looking for a connection
As Col. Craig Tucker, commander of the 7th Regimental Combat Team, stooped and stood inside the cage, Hussey and Flanagan compared the cage with a picture of Bigley taken by his captors, then decided he probably wasn't photographed there.
"Well, somebody got kept in there," Tucker said.
The Marines searched the rest of the house, clambering over a pile of rubble at the back of the room and into the hallway behind it. Children's drawings of cats and elephants covered the clay walls beside scratchings from Koranic verses.
Curtains made of burlap feed bags covered windows and bisected rooms, and grimy mattresses lay on the floors.
In a yawning black doorway off one of the clay-walled rooms was another chilling find: a dungeon-like room, pitch-black except for the flashlights of the Marines as they focused on a bloody fingerprint and cryptic etchings.
Scratched into the clay were words:
"Put . . . "
"Kept . . . "
"Plan . . . "
" . . . to pass on."
All were written in both English and Arabic. Beside those words was one more, written only in giant Arabic loops:
"Hope."
read till the end..bet ya didnt know there are lethal chemicals out there for sure....
A banner for Tawhid and Jihad--the name of al-Zarqawi's organization until he changed it last month to Al Qaeda in Iraq (news - web sites)--was recovered Saturday from the home, as were several black face masks, volumes of documents, handcuffs and two long, apparently blood-stained knives, military officials said.
On Sunday, a somber patrol of Marine officers visited the squalid two-story house on the edge of a dirt field in southern Fallujah.
The site is among nearly 20 found in Fallujah where insurgent atrocities are believed to have been committed. Maj. Jim West, intelligence officer for the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force, said Sunday that some of the sites appear to have been used to hold Western hostages and others to torture or kill local people who disobeyed insurgents.
The Marine patrol also visited a second site Sunday that might have been another hostage holding area, this one in a building that contained a wire cage large enough for a human that had an intravenous bag beside it, as well as windowless, dungeon-like rooms, one of which had bloody fingerprints inside.
The Sunni Triangle city was invaded by U.S. and Iraqi forces Nov. 8 in an effort to cripple an insurgency that has beheaded foreign hostages and waged a campaign of bombings and assassinations.
`It all just came out'
U.S. intelligence officials said they were led to the house with the banner for al-Zarqawi's group on Friday by a man claiming to have escaped imprisonment there.
"He started talking, and it all just came out," said Capt. Raymond Pemberton, the intelligence officer for the 2nd Battalion, 2nd Infantry Regiment of the Army's 1st Infantry Division. The unit had been attached to the Marine Corps' 7th Regiment during the battle for Fallujah.
After viewing the house, speaking to Iraqi troops in the area and interviewing the informant, intelligence sources said they believed Arab and Western hostages had been held in the home, perhaps including British hostage Kenneth Bigley, who was beheaded in early October.
As the Marine officers visited the two houses Sunday, accompanied by a few reporters, they carried maps, documents and photographs that itemized materials found in earlier inspections.
While intermittent gunfire rattled nearby and the occasional thunder of arms caches being destroyed by American forces could be heard, the group viewed the homes in jaw-clenched silence.
The house most closely linked to al-Zarqawi, which contained the Tawhid and Jihad banner, is the last in a jumble of four homes in a neighborhood where Fallujah melts into the desert.
Three empty bottles of whiskey were dropped beside the front walk, and a pair of the type of black gym shoes worn by many insurgents was in the doorway beside a black ski mask.
Inside, a black banner bearing Arabic writing was taken off a wall in an empty room. Translated, it read "There is no God but God" and "The Organization of Tawhid and Jihad."
In the darkened hallway beside the empty room was a stained area where the informant told U.S. forces that captives had been tortured, said Maj. Lawrence Hussey, intelligence officer for the 7th Marine Regiment.
Thick nails protruded from the wall. A dirty black mask with holes cut for the eyes and mouth was on the floor beneath the stairs Sunday.
Mattresses and blankets
In a room to one side, there were torn mattresses and scattered blankets where intelligence officials believe insurgents had slept.
The informant told U.S. forces that the two rooms across the hall had been used to hold hostages. In one of them, seven more black masks, two British-made bulletproof vests, a pair of handcuffs and two AK-47 assault rifles were found.
In several of the videotaped beheadings of hostages, terrorists are seen wearing similar clothing, standing in front of a banner identical to the one torn off the wall of the house.
In addition to the knives found in the house, three cell phones and three ID cards--one for an Iraqi citizen and two for employees of an American contractor working in Iraq--were recovered.
There was a steel bar bolted into the bathroom wall. A chain dangled from it.
Holes through the walls connected the home to the three adjoining houses north of it, one of which the Marines identified as a chemistry lab and bombmaking factory.
Lethal ingredients
On a counter in the apparent bomb factory were a disassembled hand grenade, rubber gloves and numerous bottles of chemicals.
"This one says potassium cyanide," said an Egyptian translator employed by the Marines. At that point Sunday afternoon, he was the only one who could talk.
Sodium cyanide, he continued reading. Sulfuric acid. Hydrochloric acid.
Eventually, Chief Warrant Officer Lee Fair, of the 1st Battalion, 8th Marines, said quietly, "Anyone that knew what they were doing could put these things together and make something very dangerous. Looks like [in the next room] they were trying to put crude weapons together."
In that room, a hooded gas mask lay beside a large glass box, as did gloves, a carton of blasting caps and beakers full of chemicals. The floor was littered with broken glass and concrete chips blown out of the walls during the attack.
Earlier in the day, the team had visited a site farther north, a low H-shaped building first investigated by attacking Marines who spent the night in a building across the street.
In a dim room at the back of the building's courtyard, a cage was tucked into a corner, cobbled together from rusted bits of wire, chicken coops, broken crates and twist ties. It was tall enough for a person to stand in.
Beside it, investigators found a discarded IV bag on the stone floor, beside two rotting grass mattresses. Marine Lt. John Flanagan, an Arabic linguist, said a fluorescent light was found in the cage.
Looking for a connection
As Col. Craig Tucker, commander of the 7th Regimental Combat Team, stooped and stood inside the cage, Hussey and Flanagan compared the cage with a picture of Bigley taken by his captors, then decided he probably wasn't photographed there.
"Well, somebody got kept in there," Tucker said.
The Marines searched the rest of the house, clambering over a pile of rubble at the back of the room and into the hallway behind it. Children's drawings of cats and elephants covered the clay walls beside scratchings from Koranic verses.
Curtains made of burlap feed bags covered windows and bisected rooms, and grimy mattresses lay on the floors.
In a yawning black doorway off one of the clay-walled rooms was another chilling find: a dungeon-like room, pitch-black except for the flashlights of the Marines as they focused on a bloody fingerprint and cryptic etchings.
Scratched into the clay were words:
"Put . . . "
"Kept . . . "
"Plan . . . "
" . . . to pass on."
All were written in both English and Arabic. Beside those words was one more, written only in giant Arabic loops:
"Hope."