suspicious Chemical found Could this be it?

NBC's white house correspondant now says this is a bust. No chemicals. The pentagon is now calling the sight a "chemical weapons training ground." Whatever that means.

boots. don't make me red pen you.
apostrophe, man. apostrophe.

Let's just wait until they actually say that they found WMD, rather than relying on "embeds" who will report finding a bag of flour as "a suspiscious white powder!"

Better?


:mumble: nazi poop checker :mumble: cheesehead :mumble: thespian wanna be :mumble:

Even if they've already found something Centcom would probably want to sit on the story anyway. If we start waving around a smoking gun, that removes any incentive for the Iraqis to not use any chem/bio weapons they have.

Everyone is itchy for them find something and as soon as someone sees powder, they pounce. If Iraq still has WMD, it take some searching to find. They wont wont find it by chance on the battlefield.

True. I was just updating the story. As we have seen, first reports are never right, so updates are relevant.

They are confirming, however, that documents pertaining to chemical weapons were found....

They are now saying, the chemical is there. Chemicals that could indeed hurt the troops.

What they are also saying is:


"a senior U.S. official in Washington who is familiar with initial testing said the materials at the first site were believed to be explosives.
"Initial reports are that the material is probably just explosives, but we're still going through the place," the official said."

Link for that quote.

Zimpy, got a link for us?

Heard it on the news. From a general in Iraq.

Not trying to start a tit-for-tat here, but what was the timing of the report you saw? Was it before or after the "preliminary" testing, and did the general know about the testing yet?

(I didn't see the report, so I don't know any of the details.)

It was not even a minute before I posted it.

Yahoo! News has this:

http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tm...iraq_chemical_5





Who knows...only time will tell.

Suspicious? Yes. Conclusive? No.

There are also reports that cyanide and mustard "agents" were found in high concentrations in the Euphrates. (link)

Sounds like they tried to get rid of the evidence by dumping it into the river.

Or it's just left overs from the 80's.

Make the companies that sold it to them clean it up.

I wonder what Green Peace or the Sierra Club are going to say when they find out.

Somebody on Fox News said that it appears they may have been trying to poison our troops downstream who, by way of water purification, use that water to drink. The person on Fox News (I can't remember who) said that the poison is very diluted and the purification system does the rest.

Either way if this is verified and chemicals used for making chem weapons this would validate the allies reasons for going in. It would also pose another question. The UN inspectors supposedly visited this site 9 times. If this place stores chemicals how come this was not reported by the inspectors who were supposed to be inspecting. That would sound to me like one of 2 things. They were on the payroll of Iraq or they weren't doing there job.

Indeed. That makes me think of the presentation that Colin Powell gave in February with all that evidence pointing to the WMD. Remember the recorded radio transmission between two Iraqi soldiers talking about moving the material (or whatever word they used) because the inspectors were going there that day.



Or they were being decieved. The first is too cynical for me. Could be your second choice though.

Lots of chemicals that are poisonous to drink aren't weapons. The UN inspectors weren't looking for poisonous substances, they were looking for specific agents and the materials to make them.

I'm beginning to think that any "evidence" will do.

Why bother? We've moved on to the humanitarian justification or did you not get the memo about the new Branding strategy? Disarmamenet is so 6 weeks ago..

Besides, justification is a moot point now.

Highly doubtful.

Why is that? What is the half-life of documents?

Besides, the bulk of Iraq's WMD programs were done during that period when they had lots of friends and everyone was looking the other way.

The stuff that they hadn't accounted for, the stuff in the UK "dossier", the stuff in Powell's speech to the UN, etc was all based on the reports of what they had mostly achieved in the 80's.

That's how we knew they had it. What we didn't know is the remainder of stuff we didn't destroy in the 90's and speculation about what might be new.

There might be some new stuff, but the vast majority of Iraq's capability was achieved in the 80's.

Oh. Your original comment makes more sense now. I thought you were refering to the concentration of chemicals in the river.

But if you were refering to the documents, that makes more sense.



No wait. I'm still confused. After 20 years, the contamination wouldn't be that high... unless they have been dumping consistently in the recent past...in which case it doesn't matter if they were left over from the 80's cause they still had them recently...until they dumped them in the river...

Oh, Sh�t. Now I've gone cross-eyed....

Sorry. As I see it there were a few claims of "evidence":

1) documents (they could be decades old or probably just the manuals that came with the stuff when they bought it from western companies)

2) poisonous chemicals (not illegal)

3) chemicals in the water (could just be pollution. If it was intentional poisoning, that doesn't mean it was some illegal agent.)

And anything we find is probably leftover from the 80's. Their WMD program was booming then. The inspectors in 91 were floored by the scope of the programs. That means they predated 91.

The question of disarmament (if it even matters any more) is a question of (1) what happened to the remainder of stuff we didn't destroy (stuff from the 80's); (2) what new stuff could they have pulled off since 98 (doing anything during the 90's while everyone was watching is questionable but perhaps possible).