The Australian newspaper, The Age, features an interview with a scientist formerly in Saddam's employ who insists that Iraq maintained stockpiles of WMDs, at least until he was arrested and almost executed in 1998 (via Drudge):

For seven years, before he was tortured and sentenced to death, Rashid (not his real name) worked at the top of Iraq's scientific establishment. He says he regularly met Saddam Hussein and his cousin and strongman deputy prime minister Abdul Tawab Huweish. After the Gulf War he was put in charge of a taskforce code named "Al Babel" to develop stealth technology to make aircraft and missiles undetectable on radar.

Rashid, who now lives in Melbourne, also claims to have had access as a trusted insider to secret underground bunkers where chemical weapons were stored. "Saddam gave me access to everything, he was so desperate to perfect the stealth technology," he says.

Now Rashid's great fear is that Saddam loyalists still active in postwar Iraq may get to the chemicals and weapons he saw hidden away before fleeing for his life.

Rashid was arrested by the Mukhabarat, tortured, and set up to be executed for suspicion of disloyalty to Saddam in 1998. Until then, Rashid had access to all facilities in his capacity as a researcher into stealth technology, and claims Saddam himself told him and showed him where chemical and biological weapons were being stored. In his interview with The Age, Rashid mentions several specific locations for underground storage bunkers, including an intriguing assertion about an island in the Tigris River in Baghdad.

His fear is that remnants of Saddam's regime will get to them before the Coalition and use the WMDs on either Coalition troops or the Iraqis themselves. If that happens, it will make yesterday's attack in Fallujah look like a ticker-tape parade.

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