Chemical Weapons in Iraq??Follow

Just remember fox is very biased in reporting the "War on Terror". Besides one incident hardly supports the claims made prior to US operations in the MiddleEast.

Edited, Mon May 17 12:46:12 2004 by spawned

Though I would agree that foxnews leans to the right I find it hard to believe that they are making this up. This proves that the weapons are there. Any chemical/biological or nuclear weapon is considered a WMD I believe. Used as they are intended a 155mm artillery shell with chem/bio inside could do a ton of damage. Far more than a conventional round.

All Fox does is lick the balls of the "Right" and throw stones at anyone else.

I'd say MSNBC is the Most fair and balanced....

though I like the BBC better.

Experts believe both the sarin and mustard gas weapons date back to the Persian Gulf War
"It was a weapon we believed was stocked from the ex-regime time," Kimmitt said. "It had been thought to be an ordinary artillery shell, set up like an IED. When it exploded, it indicated that it had some sarin in it."

Wow.. an old shell of indeterminate age and origin, which wasn't actually being used as a chemical weapon since the person rigging it up was probably not even aware it contained sarin.

Well, any port in a storm I suppose.

I think you're missing the point though Joph. When the round was built is irrelevant. Iraq claimed that all such rounds were destroyed prior to the first Gulf war. They then insisted that they didn't have any for 11 years after that war.

Yet here we find one. That leaves us with one of two basic posibilities:

1. They really did think they destroyed all of them, but this one was missed somehow, or incorrectly labled, and never got destroyed.

That's great and all, but I'm not sure I feel safer about a regime that builds Sarin bombs and misplaces them versus one that might actively use them against us. Seems like it would be remakably easy for one or more to get "misplaced" into the hands of a terrorist group..

2. The regime knew they had them, and lied about destroying them. This in turn leaves us with a couple major possibilities:

a) There were never that many to begin with, and the few they had were hidden by mis-labeling them. Then maybe those who knew which were which died or were captured during the war.

b) There were quite a few, and they knew right where they were, but maybe this one got lost in the shuffle (mislabeled?), and got left behind when they shipped the rest of the stockpile to another hidden location.


Dunno. It's still significant news. It's direct evidence of a very clear violation of the cease-fire agreement. Since that's the major part of the "WMD" angle for our cause for war with Iraq, this is pretty important. This was not some unexploded munitions lost in the desert from the Iran/Iraq war. This was stored somewhere for 20 years, clearly in violation of the agreement.

During the drive home from work NPR reported that the tests that indicate the presence of the chemical agent may be inaccurate. If I'm remembering correctly it was our military/gov't agencies making this statement.

It sounds like the report of the presence of the chemical weapon agents is still under some question at this point.

As I commented in January, despite the fact that we're a first world nation with a supposively sophisticated system of security, there's enough counts of us "misplacing" radioactive materials, nuclear secrets, computers, germ vials, etc that I have to take...

...with a pretty large grain of salt.

Given that the "a senior coalition source has told the BBC the round does not signal the discovery of weapons of mass destruction", you'll have to excuse me for not taking you at your word that this is anything major. You were also the one claiming the January cache was significant as I recall.

But by using chemical weapons it is going to appear to many US citizens who may now be against the war that "Hey, they really are using WMD, maybe we do have a reason to be over there." And as we can see, the media(at least FOX) will use it to sway opinions of the war if they can. In my opinion they are defeating themselves if they want to ruin support for the war on the american homefront.

All of which really only matters if you're a citizen of the US and have a vested interest in whether or not the WMD part of the justification for military action in Iraq was correct or not. You may make that connection, but the average Iraqi insurgent is not. He's going to see an explosive that he can use to try to kill some US soldiers. To them, it's not about propaganda. It's about killing people they've been told are enemies.


You are trying really hard to push your point of view onto them. They do not have the same agenda that you do. They aren't trying to prove to the American people that the war was unjust. That's the job of left wing doves. They are just trying to kill US soldiers. Nothing more.

Any idea how many undiscovered mines there are in the world?There are still mines in Europe for Godsake that got lost track of, not to mention Vietnam, Korea etc, so the news that a 20 year old mine was discovered in an area that has been a warzone for most of known history and may have chemical weapons in it really doesnt impress me.

it's about 15 centimeters, or near 1 foot in diameter. The shell is an old bianary mixing device, which means you stick it in the launch tube, fire the round off. the force of the round leaving the barrel depresses a plunger that ejects the 2 seperate liquid components of sarin into the mixing chamber, the spin from the bore rifles mixes it in the main chamber, and once you reach target altitude, <boom> could of icky gas. if you don't have the force of launch and the mixing, the round is basically useless in that form. there are much eviler ways they could have used that shell if they knew what they were doing.

I wouldn't be at all suprised if we see many more of those before the show is over. I'm scared ******** that they will find some of the Vx shells.

/shrug

Yeah. I suppose so. There are differences though. You lose quite a bit of credibility that something was "accidentally lost" when you've used said weapons multiple times in the past, then deny having them anymore, and then one shows up, unlabled, 12 years later. As opposed to an "official" defense research lab, operating under the restrictions placed on the use and research of bio weapons like Anthrax.

The point is that they are not supposed to have "any" chemical weapons at this point. Not "just a few", or even "one". After all, they had 12 years to locate and notify the UN of any weapons they found that had chemical warheads in them. We were not under UN resolution at the time...


Of course we need to wait for confirmation and not jump to any conclusions. I'm just looking at the odds here. If it does turn out that this was a Sarin gas warhead, then there's a pretty nasty set of probabilities here. We have to assume that the people who rigged this thing had some access to some store of weapons. They could have come from anywhere. But what are the odds that this one happened to be the *only* one with a sarin gas warhead?

There's a rule that scientists use when considering probabilities (usually when there's not enough data to actually make any really accurate estimate): Nature never does something just once. Same goes with human actions. Whether that warhead was in whatever storage area these guys got it from by accident or design is irrelevant. If there was one warhead of that type available for use, odds are pretty good there are more.

That's the real scare of this situation. What if some group of Iraqi insurgents found a stockpile of unmarked shells hidden in some basement somewhere? What if this was where someone at some point in the past hid a bunch of chemical warheads. Heck. Who cares if it was Saddam, or one of his sons, or some minister hoping to use them for his own purposes, or they just got lost and forgotten there. It doesn't matter. What does matter is that if that's the case, and there are more of those where they got the first, they now know what kind of weapons they are.

I would gladly have us never find a single substantiated WMD in Iraq if that meant that none of the insurgents had access to such weapons. I'm more then willing to argue on this forum that we were justified to enter Iraq even if we didn't find WMD in country. I'm not going to be overjoyed if our "proof" comes in the form of a massive gassing attack on our soldiers in Iraq.

This in no way justifies the war. This is crap that Saddam had twenty years ago, that we probably gave him. Of course if I was a Republican and Clinton was still president, I would have to point out the incredible timing of this "find", and how it very conventiently draws attention away from the prisoner abuse scandal.

One shell means nothing. Even if Iraq had a thousand bunkers filled with millions of these shells, it would still not justify the war, because they still would not have been a threat to the US in any way.