Mr Impotence

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Saddam’s WMD: Discovery and Denial "Now that our units in Iraq have discovered the smoking gun that the left has seemingly wanted for the past three years, they have shifted the goalposts again.  And one more time, the facts of Saddam’s WMD must be presented to the American people to counter the lies of the media, and regrettably, some people in our own government agencies. The left and their allies in the press are apparently too dense to understand the significance of the Coalition previously finding biological agent seed cultures, several hundred tons of purified nuclear material, and tons of chemical weapon (CW) precursors.  But this entire controversy has never been about the weapons themselves, the age of the munitions, or the media promoted fantasy of pallets of chemical rounds ready to be loaded into Iraqi artillery pieces.  From the beginning it has been about the campaign of disinformation and deception of the antique media and the shadow government within our intelligence agencies to discredit the administration in a time of war. The Sec. State and Pre-war Intelligence A typical response to the NGIC report on these chemical weapons is found in a piece by Dafna Linzer in the Washington Post.  After briefly covering Santorum’s and Hoekstra’s news conference, Linzer quotes the proverbial unnamed "intelligence officials" who said that these, .shells were old and were not the suspected weapons of mass destruction sought in Iraq after the 2003 invasion. This is a false statement and in fact, directly contradicts publicly divulged US and European pre-war intelligence estimates as stated by both the President in his 2003 State of the Union address, and former Secretary of State Colin Powell’s speech before the UN  a little over a week later. According to the US and the UN, the age of the weapons was immaterial.  The primary issue has always been one of accountability.  The weapons and banned material either had to have been verified as destroyed or be made available for inspection and inventory by UN agencies.  Since Saddam actively resisted the inspectors, and then later kicked them out of Iraq, Powell was obligated to present to the UN key intelligence assessments about the unknown status of Iraq’s chemical weapons: . Saddam Hussein has never accounted for vast amounts of chemical weaponry: 550 artillery shells with mustard, 30,000 empty munitions and enough precursors to increase his stockpile to as much as 500 tons of chemical agents. [Emphasis mine] . If we consider just one category of missing weaponry-6,500 bombs from the Iran-Iraq war-UNMOVIC says the amount of chemical agent in them would be in the order of 1,000 tons . We know that Iraq has embedded key portions of its illicit chemical weapons infrastructure within its legitimate civilian industry. [Emphasis mine]  Illicit and legitimate production can go on simultaneously; or, on a dime, this dual-use infrastructure can turn from clandestine to commercial and then back again. Because of the NGIC report, we now know that Powell’s number of 550 unaccounted for CW rounds was amazingly accurate.  Coupled with previous reporting on precursors and on accounts provided by Ken Timmerman, who could now logically contradict Powell’s pre-war intelligence on CW?  Ironically, the people who most regret the information provided during the speech are Powell himself and his former military aide.  Somebody had better give them a call and tell them that at least on the CW intelligence portion of his speech, Powell was right. Coalition Forces and Chemical Weapons What is surprising in the wake of the report is that the military leadership seems to have joined the "nothing to see here" crowd, even though it has been Army and Marine units in Iraq that have done the heavy lifting in uncovering Saddam’s CW.  Almost from the very start of Operation Iraqi Freedom Coalition troops discovered CW precursors co-located with military ordnance yards or in ammo dumps.  These finds included huge warehouses and caches of "commercial and agricultural" chemicals, including 55 gallon drums buried in bunkers six feet underground.  Notably, this is another instance where the former Sec. State’s assessment has been proven true. Tests performed on these substances by chemical warfare specialists produced positive results for sarin, cyclo-sarin, and mustard agents.  But later, the ISG pronounced all of the military’s tests as flawed, and the CW uncovered as inconsequential.  Meanwhile, the media and the ISG focused on the technical minutiae of Powell’s data on mobile bio-war labs to divert attention from the significance of our troops’ discoveries. As the NGIC report shows, units continued to turn up large amounts of chemical munitions whose potency could last for well over 20 years.  Yet, in response to the potential force protection problems should these rounds ever be used against our troops, the Coalition command in Iraq has seemingly adopted the ISG’s tactics of minimization and disinformation.  Major William Willhoite, a spokesman for Multi-National Forces-Iraq (MNF-I) stated No old chemical weapons have yet been rigged to improvised explosive devices used by Iraq’s insurgents. "We have never had an IED utilizing anything but conventional munitions," The good Major is either not very well read or he has completely ignored open source civilian and military accounts of our forces’ encounters with WMD since the end of major combat operations: . In May of 2004, elements of the 1st Cavalry Division encountered a 155mm binary chemical artillery shell wired as an IED http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,120268,00.html .  The round exploded before it could be rendered safe exposing two US soldiers to the deadly nerve agent, who then displayed the classic symptoms of sarin exposure: dilated pupils and nausea.  Later tests confirmed that the shell contained three to four liters of sarin. . On May 2, 2004, a 155mm shell filled with mustard agent was discovered; this one also rigged as an IED.  In keeping with the tradition of dismissing Coalition forces recovering WMDs, ISG testing concluded that the mustard gas was "stored improperly" and was thus "ineffective." . Later in May, the 1st Cavalry Division again discovered CW when Troop D, 9th Cavalry Regiment seized over forty 155mm artillery rounds suspected of containing a chemical warfare agent because they were leaking an unknown substance. . And finally last August, US troops raided a warehouse in Mosul and discovered a chemical weapons factory containing 1,500 gallons of 11 different chemical agent precursors.  A military spokesman said that the facility was a new one that was established after the 2003 invasion of Iraq. And before all of these incidents, in January of 2004, Danish forces in Southern Iraq discovered 120mm mortar shells with a mysterious liquid inside that initially tested positive for blister agents.  Further tests by the ISG were, of course, negative. In many ways, the effort to publicize declassified portions of the NGIC report is similar to the Weekly Standard’s fight with the DIA to release tens of thousands of unclassified documents seized after OIF.  But as Santorum and Hoekstra point out (sign-in required), this episode of obstructing the requests of our lawmakers occurred because elements within our own intelligence community deliberately abused their classification authority to withhold open source information about discoveries of Saddam’s chemical weapons. Keep in mind that there is a lot more material left to be "declassified." http://www.americanthinker.com/articles.php?article_id=5622 I am off to Judge at a Dance Event at the fabulous Camelback Resort is Scottsdale Arizona, see you all next week!

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I am off to Judge at a Dance Event at the fabulous Camelback Resort is Scottsdale Arizona, see you all next week!

Have a good time, and thanks for the editorials, always nice to read a well-crafted opinion piece.  ;^)

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Multiple posting of editoritals from obscure online sources again?

Again we find Pixie attacking the source and ignoring the facts that he is impotent to confront! Read about the writer of that piece! "Douglas Hanson was a US Army cavalry reconnaissance officer for 20 years, and is a Gulf War I combat veteran.  He was an Atomic Demolitions Munitions (ADM) Security Officer, and a Nuclear, Biological, and Chemical Defense Officer.  As a civilian analyst, he has worked on stability and support operations in Bosnia, and was initially an operations officer in the operations/intelligence cell of the Requirements Coordination Office of the CPA in Baghdad.  He was later assigned as the Chief of Staff of the Ministry of Science and Technology." I am off to Judge at a Dance Event at the fabulous Camelback Resort is Scottsdale Arizona, see you all next week!

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ignoring the facts

Why stop? Most of your posts ignore the facts.

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I am off

Thank goodness. Peace at last.

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I am off to Judge at a Dance Event at the fabulous Camelback Resort is Scottsdale Arizona, see you all next week! Have a good time, and thanks for the editorials, always nice to read a well-crafted opinion piece.  ;^)

break a leg!

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did courageously avow: I am off to Judge at a Dance Event at the fabulous Camelback Resort is Scottsdale Arizona, see you all next week! Have a good time, and thanks for the editorials, always nice to read a well-crafted opinion piece.  ;^) break a leg!

You’re just trying to boost my spirits aren’t you.  [8-) — Ken Wilson

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courageously avow: I am off Thank goodness. Peace at last.

You are too kind.  I would have responded with something more like "We knew that already."  [8-) — Ken Wilson

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Blah, blah, blah.  Even Sontorum & Hoekstra said this find wasn’t the smoking gun. This whole article is stupid because both the ISG & Deufler said that we would find some WMDs like we found. And there weren’t any lies by the media or the left, i.e., it was David Kay & Deufler that said that there were no WMDs. Wheaton – does this article reflect your views on this matter.  If so, it confirms that you are indeed a right-wacko. Mr Soul

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PS – Wheaton forgot to mark this thread OT.  Surprise, surprise.  He says he wants these post to stop but yet he keeps making them himself. Mr Soul

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Get over it John.  The weapons we went in for were not there. Iraq Survey Group’s (ISG) Head Charles Duelfer appeared on the June 22 broadcast of National Public Radio’s Talk of the Nation, where he stated that these munitions are not weapons of mass destruction: NEAL CONAN (host): The report says hundreds of WMDs were found in Iraq. Does this change any of the findings in your report? DUELFER: No, the report — the findings of the report were basically to describe the relationship of the regime with weapons of mass destruction generally. You know, at two different times, Saddam elected to have and then not to have weapons of mass destruction. We found, when we were investigating, some residual chemical munitions. And we said in the report that such chemical munitions would probably still be found. But the ones which have been found are left over from the Iran-Iraq War. They are all almost 20 years old, and they are in a decayed fashion. It is very interesting that there are so many that were unaccounted for, but they do not constitute a weapon of mass destruction, although they could be a local hazard. CONAN: Mm-hmm. So these — were these the weapons of mass destruction that the Bush administration said it was going into Iraq to find before the war? DUELFER: No, these do not indicate an ongoing weapons of mass destruction program as had been thought to exist before the war. These are leftover rounds, which Iraq probably did not even know that it had. Certainly, the leadership was unaware of their existence, because they made very clear that they had gotten rid of their programs as a prelude to getting out of sanctions. http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5504298

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courageously avow: Blah, blah, blah.  Even Sontorum & Hoekstra said this find wasn’t the smoking gun. This whole article is stupid because both the ISG & Deufler said that we would find some WMDs like we found. And there weren’t any lies by the media or the left, i.e., it was David Kay & Deufler that said that there were no WMDs. Wheaton – does this article reflect your views on this matter.  If so, it confirms that you are indeed a right-wacko. Mr Soul

Hey, not fair.  A right-wacko with libertarian tendencies.  Or so he would have us believe. — Ken Wilson

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courageously avow: PS – Wheaton forgot to mark this thread OT.  Surprise, surprise.  He says he wants these post to stop but yet he keeps making them himself. Mr Soul

Probably so excited about starting his own thread he was too busy pissing himself to remember to OT it. — Ken Wilson

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courageously avow: Get over it John.  The weapons we went in for were not there. Right-winger’s dreams die hard…

They only wish they could get hard, which would explain Rush’s need for Viagra.  I guess the pain of not being able to actually had him using OxyContin ’til he got caught. — Ken Wilson

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Get over it John.  The weapons we went in for were not there.

That’s correct.  I’ve just finished reading through some of the testimony (Tuesday’s House Hearings) of Dr. David Kay. What was really found, are a bunch of old, decaying and rather dangerous chemical weapons.  We knew we’d find those, *regardless* of our big time search for WMD’s. But, these were in NO WAY part of a big "find" of WMD’s. Not even close.  If the Iraqis would have tried to use some of these, it likely would have killed *them*, rather than *us.* And what about that claim that they’ve used some chemical weapons as "IED’s?" The worst part of those old weapons, is that the Iraqi Army didn’t mark their chemical weapons, as such.  As a result, they were mixed in with munitions, all over the country.  It wasn’t *meant* to happen, but it did in the confusion of war. So…..some insurgent gets hold of an old round, assumes it will simply explode…..but…. What we’re all seeing, is the Republican spin machine in "high gear", in an attempt to save some sort of reputation in time for the coming elections. That is *all* that it is. Mike

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And what about that claim that they’ve used some chemical weapons as "IED’s?" The worst part of those old weapons, is that the Iraqi Army didn’t mark their chemical weapons, as such.  As a result, they were mixed in with munitions, all over the country.  It wasn’t *meant* to happen, but it did in the confusion of war.

The only Iraqi chemical shells to be clearly marked apparently were mustard gas shells (with a green band).  There were also tags on shipping crates but those were easily lost or ignored by those who didn’t know what to look for. The reason for this is normally those munitions were only let out of the barn when accompanied by specially trained troops who didn’t need to be told what was inside the shells.  That system broke down under coalition air attack in the first gulf war and the recent invasion, thus assorted aging chemical munitions being scattered around the country.  Or at least that’s what the CIA reported. . . . So…..some insurgent gets hold of an old round, assumes it will simply explode…..but….

There have been one or two occasions when such munitions were used in IEDs, with no fatal results. What we’re all seeing, is the Republican spin machine in "high gear", in an attempt to save some sort of reputation in time for the coming elections.

There is plenty of spin from both sides, but the claim that 500 rusty old shells is sufficient proof of Saddam having WMD is an especially feeble example of trying to re-write history.

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