Comments on: 500 WMD munitions found in Iraq since 2003

By: steveegg

steveegg — Fri, 23 Jun 2006 11:54:57 +0000

I trust named sources over unnamed ones. From yesterday's DoD news briefing with Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and General George Casey, Commander of the Multinational Force in Iraq -

Q Mr. Secretary, there's been a lot made on Capitol Hill about the chemical weapons that were found and may be quite old. But do you have a real concern of these weapons from Saddam's past perhaps having an impact on U.S. troops who are on the ground in Iraq right now? SEC. RUMSFELD: Certainly. What's been announced is accurate, that there have been hundreds of canisters or weapons of various types found that either currently have sarin in them or had sarin in them. And sarin's dangerous. And it's dangerous to our forces and it's a concern. So, obviously, to the extent we can locate these and destroy them, it's important that we do so. They are dangerous. And anyone, I'm sure, General Casey or anyone else in that country, would be concerned if they got in the wrong hands. They are weapons of mass destruction. They're harmful to human beings. And they have been found. And they had not been reported by Saddam Hussein as he inaccurately alleged that he had reported all of his weapons. And they are still being found and discovered.

Of course, you won't see that reported in WaPo, on CNN, or anywhere else in the Left Stream Media. Your witness.

By: folkbum

folkbum — Thu, 22 Jun 2006 22:34:14 +0000

From the Washington Post: The lawmakers pointed to an unclassified summary from a report by the National Ground Intelligence Center regarding 500 chemical munitions shells that had been buried near the Iranian border, and then long forgotten, by Iraqi troops during their eight-year war with Iran, which ended in 1988. The U.S. military announced in 2004 in Iraq that several crates of the old shells had been uncovered and that they contained a blister agent that was no longer active. Neither the military nor the White House nor the CIA considered the shells to be evidence of what was alleged by the Bush administration to be a current Iraqi program to make chemical, biological and nuclear weapons. So Santorum trots out old news about weapons that were no longer capable of "mass destruction" that the Iraqis didn't even know they had, and you want us to, what? say we were wrong? Intellegence, officials, DoD officials, and the White House all said that the WMDs Santorum talked about were not the ones hyped as justification for the war. Those WMDs do not--and did not--exists. Period. This is Santorum's desperate attempt to seem relevant to voters in a state where he doesn't even live anymore who are about to make him unemployed.

By: steveegg

steveegg — Thu, 22 Jun 2006 13:45:40 +0000

I see you got the talking-points fax. Are you going to deny that Iraq was to have destroyed those 500 munitions under the terms of the ceasefire that ended the Gulf War? I seem to recall that their continued possession of those munitions was one of the justifications for the Iraq War.

As for the “old” argument, I seem to recall “age” not being an issue when various enviro-whacko groups opposed the plan to burn the remains of the aged US chemical arsenal back in the 1980s.

By: folkbum

folkbum — Thu, 22 Jun 2006 13:32:06 +0000

Unfortunately, this does not prove anything. Bush himself has acknowledged that "Iraq did not have the weapons that our intelligence believed were there." Your precious FOXNews did cover the story: Offering the official administration response to FOX News, a senior Defense Department official pointed out that the chemical weapons were not in useable conditions. "This does not reflect a capacity that was built up after 1991," the official said, adding the munitions "are not the WMDs this country and the rest of the world believed Iraq had, and not the WMDs for which this country went to war." In short, there is nothing Rick (I'm down 20 points in the polls!) Santorum knows that disputes what the Iraq Survey Group--handpicked by Bush--reported: While a small number of old, abandoned chemical munitions have been discovered, ISG judges that Iraq unilaterally destroyed its undeclared chemical weapons stockpile in 1991. There are no credible Indications that Baghdad resumed production of chemical munitions thereafter.