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the world stops. everybody is watching. good morning. welcome back to new day. we spent almost a decade looking for chemical weapons in iraq and supposedly getting rid of them. well, guess who found them? isis. militants have taken control of a notorious chemical weapons facility that once, of course, belonged to saddam hussein, potentially deadly poisons are said to still be inside. now iraq s grand ayatollah is speaking out as president obama announces the u.s. course of action. we re tracking every angle of this crisis. let s begin in baghdad with nic robertson. nic, what are we hearing from there? reporter: well, chris, one of the keys is, and as we all know, there s a real distrust in this country of prime minister nuri al maliki. president obama says essentially that he has to go, but how does he go? well, it s got to be through, if you will, the the words of the senior most senior shiia cleric here. i mean, listen to his prayers this morning. ....
Have been met. if the military leaders believe that we can identify high value targets that striking them could have a measurable impact on the situation on the ground and that we can strike them with minimal risk civilian casualties and without dragging us further into the conflict. any decision on those air strikes will be tied to advances made by isis militants on the ground. that progress has slowed in the past 24 hours. militants were still battling for control of the country s largest oil refinery and seized a former chemical weapons facility just 36 miles north of baghdad. it isn t just confined to iraq and neither apparently is this administration. president obama sted he was prepared to take targeted and precise military action, a campaign of air strikes that a senior administration official told the new york times could be extended into neighbor s ....
jennifer, thank you. let s bring in mike barrett, former defense department intelligent officer from washington. i remember looking at clips recently of the vietnam war where the president said, we re going to advise them. we re sending them in to help our friends in south vietnam. the same words this time. how concerned are you about this bunch if at all? i m pretty concerned about isis but also concerned about terrorist threats in yemen, threats across north africa so i think we ll be okay in terms of the obama administers and any kind of administration and any kind of mission creep because they make it obvious they re not interested in engaging militarily. we ll probably be too cautious as opposed to digging in too far. what about this abandoned chemical weapons facility? is that much of nothing or is there something to be concerned about there? there s two things to be a aware of. one is as the state department said apparently the weapons there are not of military val. yo ....
and on the other side of this, this is where al qaeda had its chemical weapons crew, chemical weapons facility. so we got to this plateau, i think it was about 6,000 feet up, maybe, or something like that. something like that. there was a small village, the type that would be used by shepherds to put their sheep in at night. peter arnett was a correspondent. he was at the time arguably the most famous journalist in the world. they put carpets down so it made it respectable. as i recall, we waited for some period of time and had some sort of goat-like dinner. that s right. yeah. do you recall when he came in? yeah. he shook your hand, right? ....
Then they gave us sunglasses that had cardboard inside them. right. a sort of crude blindfold. did they put those on immediately on us? yep, they did. yeah. the interesting thing is that when you go to kabul, you go through these tunnels so the fact that we were blindfolded, you could feel the change in air pressure and i could hear the difference in sound through the tunnel. so you had something of a good idea of where we were heading. yeah. and on the other side of this, this is where al qaeda had its chemical weapons crew, chemical weapons facility. so we got to this plateau, i think it was about 6,000 feet up, maybe, or something like that. something like that. there was a small village, the type that would be used by ....