ALERT: Military finds artillery round with sarin nerve agent...

We can all sleep peacefully tonight.

 

Roxy, I'm still waiting on those weapon labs and production facilities, you would think they would be much easier to find than a rusty old artillery shell, and we've had the run of the house for over a year now, you can still conjure up bogeyman images about moblie weapons labs, unfortunately they don't exist thus far.


What would have done more damage had it exploded on a crowded subway.....this old leftoverartillery shell, which apparently blew up in somebodys face and did no lasting damage? Or an equivalent amount of C4?

Which one is the weapon of mass destruction?

Also, you say "To trust Saddam with this existance of WMD is complete and utter folly".....would you concede that it was even greater folly to trust him at a time he was actually using them, such as in the 1980's?



Again, what current WMD programs did he have? Because the US Iraq Survey Group hasn't found any....they could use your help.

 

...and mustard gas too...sleeping easier sam? really, liberals, why are you so desparate to discredit these reports?

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,120137,00.html

--
Sarin, Mustard Gas Discovered Separately in Iraq
Monday, May 17, 2004

BAGHDAD, Iraq_—_A roadside bomb_containing sarin nerve agent (search)_recently exploded near a U.S. military convoy, the U.S. military said Monday.

Bush administration officials told Fox News that_mustard gas (search)_was also recently discovered.

Two people were treated for "minor exposure"_after the sarin incident_but no serious injuries were reported. Soldiers transporting the shell for inspection suffered symptoms consistent with low-level chemical exposure, which is what led to the discovery, a U.S. official told Fox News.

"The Iraqi Survey Group confirmed today that a 155-millimeter artillery round containing sarin nerve agent had been found,"_Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt (search), the chief military spokesman in Iraq, told reporters in Baghdad. "The round had been rigged as an IED (improvised explosive device) which was discovered by a U.S. force convoy."

The round detonated before it would be rendered inoperable, Kimmitt said, which caused a "very small dispersal of agent."

However, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said the results were from a field test, which can be imperfect, and said more analysis was needed. If confirmed, it would be the first finding of a banned weapon upon which the United States based its case for war.

A senior Bush administration official told Fox News that the sarin gas shell is the second chemical weapon discovered recently.

Two weeks ago, U.S. military units discovered mustard gas that was used as part of an IED. Tests conducted by the_Iraqi Survey Group (search)_—_a U.S. organization_searching for weapons of mass destruction_—_and others concluded the mustard gas was "stored improperly," which made the gas "ineffective."

They believe the mustard gas shell may have been one of 550 projectiles for which former Iraqi_President_Saddam Hussein failed to account when he made his weapons declaration shortly before Operation Iraqi Freedom began last year. Iraq also failed to then account for 450 aerial bombs with mustard gas. That, combined with the shells, totaled about 80 tons of unaccounted for mustard gas.

It also appears some top Pentagon officials were_surprised by the sarin news; they thought the matter was classified, administration officials told Fox News.

An official at the U.N. Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission (UNMOVIC) headquarters in New York said the commission is surprised to hear news of the mustard gas.

"If that's the case, why didn't they announce it earlier?" the official asked.

The UNMOVIC official said the group needs to know more from the Bush administration before it's possible to determine if this is "old or new stuff. It is known that Iraq used sarin during the Iraq-Iran war, however.

Kimmitt said the shell belonged to a class of ordnance that Saddam's government_said was destroyed before the 1991 Gulf war (search). Experts believe both the sarin and mustard gas_weapons date back to that time.

"It was a weapon that we believe was stocked from the ex-regime time and it had been thought to be an ordinary artillery shell set up to explode like an ordinary IED and basically from the detection of that and when it exploded, it indicated that it actually had some sarin in it," Kimmitt said.

The incident occurred "a couple of days ago," he added. The discovery reportedly occurred near Baghdad International Airport.

Washington officials say the significance of the find is that some chemical shells do still exist in Iraq, and it's thought that fighters there may be upping their attacks on U.S. forces by using such weapons.

The round was an old "binary-type" shell in which two chemicals held in separate sections are mixed after firing to produce sarin, Kimmitt said.

He said he believed that insurgents who rigged the artillery shell as a bomb didn't know it contained the nerve agent, and that the dispersal of the nerve agent from such a rigged device was very limited.

The shell had no markings. It appears the binary sarin agents didn't mix, which is why there weren't serious injuries from the initial explosion, a U.S. official told Fox News.

"Everybody knew Saddam had chemical weapons, the question was, where did they go. Unfortunately, everybody jumped on the offramp and said 'well, because we didn't find them, he didn't have them,'" said Fox News military analyst Lt. Gen. Tom McInerney.

"I doubt if it's the tip of the iceberg but it does confirm what we've known ... that he [Saddam] had weapons of mass destruction that he used on his own people," Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, told Fox News. "This does show that the fear we had is very real. Now whether there is much more of this we don't know, Iraq is the size of the state of California."

But there were more reasons than weapons to get rid of Saddam, he added. "We considered Saddam Hussein a threat not just because of weapons of mass destruction," Grassley said.

Iraqi Scientist: You Will Find More

Gazi George, a former Iraqi nuclear scientist under Saddam's regime, told Fox News he believes many similar weapons stockpiled by the former regime were either buried underground or transported to Syria. He noted that the airport where the device was detonated is on the way to Baghdad from the Syrian border.

George said the finding likely will be the first in a series of discoveries of such weapons.

"Saddam is the type who will not store those materials in a military warehouse. He's gonna store them either underground, or, as I said, lots of them have gone west to Syria and are being brought back with the insurgencies," George told Fox News. "It is difficult to look in areas that are not obvious to the military's eyes.

"I'm sure they're going to find more once time passes," he continued, saying one year is not enough for the survey group or the military to find the weapons.

Saddam, when he was in power, had declared that he did in fact possess mustard-gas filled artilleries but none that included sarin.

"I think what we found today, the sarin in some ways, although it's a nerve gas, it's a lucky situation sarin detonated in the way it did ... it's not as dangerous as the cocktails Saddam used to make, mixing blister" agents with other gases and substances, George said.

Officials: Discovery Is 'Significant'

U.S. officials told Fox News that the shell discovery is a "significant" event.

Artillery shells of the 155-mm size are_as big as it gets when it comes to the ordnance lobbed by infantry-based artillery units. The 155 howitzer can launch high capacity shells over several miles; current models used by the United States can fire shells as far as 14 miles. One official told Fox News that a conventional 155-mm shell could hold as much as "two to five" liters of sarin, which is capable of killing thousands of people under the right conditions in highly populated areas.

The Iraqis were very capable of producing such shells in the 1980s but it's not as clear that they continued after the first Gulf War.

In 1995, Japan's_Aum Shinrikyo (search)_cult unleashed sarin gas in Tokyo's subways, killing 12 people and sickening thousands. In February of this year, Japanese courts convicted the cult's former leader, Shoko Asahara, and sentence him to be executed.

Developed in the mid-1930s by Nazi scientists, a single drop of sarin can cause quick, agonizing choking death. There are no known instances of the Nazis actually using the gas.

Nerve gases work by inhibiting key enzymes in the nervous system, blocking their transmission. Small exposures can be treated with antidotes, if administered quickly.

Antidotes to nerve gases similar to sarin are so effective that top poison gas researchers predict they eventually will cease to be a war threat.

Fox News' Wendell Goler, Steve Harrigan, Ian McCaleb, Liza Porteus, James Rosen_and The Associated Press contributed to this report.

 

basso, didn't you just accuse MacBeth of sleective "em-bolding" earlier today? Looks like two can play at that game...

By the way, I like how you use the pejorative "liberals" now in order to address people, you're getting more and more like T_J every day, just brush up on your google image searching and you''ll be there!

So that we're clear, let's figure it out:

Was the war for WMD's or for Human rights? You've switched to the latter already, are you switching back?

(Meanwhile, the chaos on the ground continues, the US international reputation has been irrperably damaged, billions of dollars go to waste, and thousands are dead.....but **** it, we found a rusty artillery shell!)

 

I object. I did nothing of the kind, as a quick persusal will reveal. Not only wasn't the non-boldened part relevent to the discussio as framed by basso, it didn't even assert what he claimed.


Sorry to pounce, SF, but this kind of line seems to affirm something which is counter-factual.

 

For future reference, putting something in bold faced font is "bolding", talking bad about the president or his disastrous foregn policy is "emboldening" as in "our enemies."

 

thanks for the grammar lesson sam, but really, why does the war only have to be about one thing? if you paid attention during the now famous 2003 SOTU speech, you'd have noticed several reasons. as i said in one of my posts in the saddam's atrocities thread, that was one of the president's reasons, but then, i put it in italics, not bold-faced, so you might have missed it.

 

Will this be the 5th or 6th time that Fox News has reported that we've found WMD's in Iraq. I stopped counting after 4. And there has been at least one more plus this one. So that's at least 6. There may have been others. I'll wait a bit to see how it all pans out before declaring that Saddam had WMD's.

 

Shouldn't you know better than to quote FOX News, which, in turn, is quoting a "senior administration official," who is, almost always, Karl Rove or Scooter Libby?

 

once again, the question must be asked, why the rush, nay the scramble, to discredit this or any other news on iRaq that could be construed as helping W? or perhaps i just answered my own question.

 

This is my point exactly. If the liberals were *truly* concerned about the welfare of the United States, they would seek to reinforce this find, as opposed to tearing it down. Reinforcement of this evidence only helps others' view of America worldwide, an issue that the liberals have been harping on for quite some time now. Ahh, but lo and behold! We see the liberals' true colors shining through, as they attempt to distort and discredit. All of this is obviously in an attempt to make the situation look worse and to make American troops and their leaders look worse. Is this leadership being demonstrated by the liberal? Of course not -- it is partisan sniping and political selfishness. Nothing new of course, but here we have it on display for all to see.

EXPOSED

 

It just seems to me that if they fired a WMD at us, everyone would be dead.

 

So Kay and Westmor...er...Myers et al are part of this rush?

Pointing out facts in the face of a rush to subvert them is not, in and of itself, an example of bias. You want to see a rush, take a look at the 1st 5 or 6 posts in this thread...

 

Because it is subject on which we have either a) been deliberately lied to at worst; or b) accidentally mislead at best, by the ever spin-conscious Bush Administration on several hundred occasions in the past, the majority of which will not be rectified by the finding of one or even one hundred leftover artillery shells.

I've said it before and I'll say it again, I was am a lot more comfortable with Saddam Hussein sitting on a decaying batch of leftover mustard gas on a turkey farm in Iraq than I am with an unmarried, male arab emigrant walking around Times Square with a few sticks of dynamite and a mental image of his cousin being raped by a broomstick.

 

The first two months...
____________

April 7: The Washington Post relays the Pentagon announcement that it has found the “smoking gun”—the 101st Airborne has located a large cache of chemical weapon-laden missiles southwest of Baghdad; buried “bioweapons labs” are also reported found.

April 10: U.S. military commanders announce they have secured the Tuwaitha nuclear facility.

April 11: U.S. military commanders reveal that before April 10, Tuwaitha, a site known to contain various radioactive materials, was left unguarded for days. During that time Iraqi civilians looted the facility, almost certainly carrying away contaminated materials.

April 12: The Guardian reports that the U.S. and British governments have rejected the idea that experienced U.N. weapon inspectors should return to Iraq. Meanwhile, the Associated Press reports that Saddam Hussein’s science adviser, Lt. Gen. Amer al-Saadi has surrendered, but insists Iraq had no WMD.

April 13: The Washington Post reports that the “smoking gun” chemical weapon found on April 7 is some sort of pesticide, probably used to combat mosquitos; as for the April 7 report that chemical weapons missiles had been found, the Pentagon “denies any knowledge of this alleged discovery.”

April 15: CNN reports that buried bioweapons labs turn out to be crates of new, unused laboratory equipment (test tubes and the like).

April 20: The Washington Post says the Pentagon intends to form a 1,000-man “Iraq Survey Group” to hunt for weapons of mass destruction. Meanwhile, Britain’s Independent sums up what has been discovered about Iraqi WMD so far: The U.S. intelligence report that the nuclear facilities at Tuwaitha had been rebuilt was a “sham”; a claim that Iraq had bought uranium in Niger was based on falsified documents; and the aluminum tubes purchased by Iraq were not for gas centrifuges to produce weapon-grade uranium. The United States claimed that Iraq was expanding its chemical facilities, but in reality the chemical site at Al Qaqaa was bombed during the first Gulf War, and its chemical weapons were then removed and destroyed by the United Nations. As for the pre-war claim that Iraq was building a dangerous unmanned aerial vehicle for the purpose of spraying bioweapons into the atmosphere, a single dismantled drone found by U.N. inspectors was not reported because it was not a prohibited item. Secretary of State Colin Powell’s claim at the United Nations in February, that Iraq had weaponized ricin, was misleading, to say the least. The truth, surely known to U.S. intelligence, was that Iraq conducted a single test in November 1990, which failed, after which the ricin project was abandoned. Similarly, no evidence to date supports Powell’s other claims— that Iraq engaged in research on smallpox, or that it had any VX, mustard gas, botulin, or anthrax.

April 21: Questions are raised about how seriously the U.S. government believed its own claims about WMD, considering that, as the New York Times reports, weapons search teams do not have adequate transport and are having to rely on borrowed helicopters. On the same day, in the same paper, reporter Judith Miller declares that an unnamed Iraqi scientist has identified an unnamed site where, he says, Iraq destroyed unnamed chemical and biological weapons before the war. Miller calls this the “most important discovery to date in the hunt for illegal weapons.”

April 24: The Washington Post reports that the reason U.S. forces waited three weeks after reaching Tuwaitha before inspecting it was due to an internal U.S. government dispute about who would be in charge. The BBC quotes the editor of Jane’s Intelligence Digest, Alex Standish, who says reports of Iraq’s WMD were “politically driven.”

April 25: President George W. Bush says WMD may not ever be found in Iraq.

April 27: New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman says it doesn’t matter if no WMD are found. On the other hand, Raymond Whitaker, writing in the Independent, says the road to war was paved with lies and that intelligence agencies were at the mercy of political appointees who distorted intelligence reports to fan the flames. The story about the purchase of uranium from Niger, based on “crude forgeries,” had been known to be false for more than a year. As for Scud missiles, not only were none fired, none were found. The Blair government plagiarized outdated graduate student papers and called them a dossier on Iraqi weapons. Other questionable information came from an exile group, the Iraqi National Congress, which was paid to “come up with” claims. It’s odd, Whitaker concludes, that if U.S. and British authorities were so concerned about finding WMD that within a few days they diverted some of the search teams to other tasks. Meanwhile, the Los Angeles Times reports that David Kay, a pre-war supporter of the administration’s position, says of the U.S. WMD search: “My impression is this has been a very low priority so far, and they’ve put very little effort into it.”

April 28: Associated Press reports that some 55-gallon drums previously found in northern Iraq and described by U.S. military personnel as containing “blister agent” contain rocket fuel.

April 29: Surrendered scientist Nassir Hindawi tells CNN he was the only person in Iraq smart enough to make powdered anthrax (about which, he adds, he kept quiet). Hindawi describes Rihab Taha, Iraq’s famous “Dr. Germ,” as a former student of his who lacked practical abilities. British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw is described by Independent correspondent Ben Russell as “hinting” that WMD may never be found, although Straw continues to insist that Iraq “had them recently.”

May 1: President Bush lands on the aircraft carrier U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln and declares an end to major combat operations in Iraq. On the same day, but reported in the May 17 Washington Post, U.S. special weapons hunters break down the doors of “Special Security Organization Al Hayat.” The padlocked innermost storage room is found to be filled with vacuum cleaners.

May 7: The Associated Press reports that Lt. Gen. William Wallace of the army’s Fifth Corps says there is “plenty of documentary evidence” of WMD coming from “lower-tier Iraqis.” Wallace offers no examples.

May 9: The Associated Press reports that Col. Richard McPhee says his teams have found no chemical or biological weapons so far, and that they might never be found, but he thinks they will find an “infrastructure.” Or, as Stephen Cambone, undersecretary of defense for intelligence says, a program for WMD will be found, just no WMD. “How it was configured and how they intended to use it” is the problem, according to Cambone.

May 11: The Los Angeles Times reports that before the war U.N. teams tracked down what U.S. intelligence had told them were “decontamination trucks” only to find they were fire trucks. Other information provided to U.N. inspectors was also less than helpful: “Sometimes it was amazingly specific. You know, ‘Go into the basement, there’s a door marked 4, go in there, then there’s a long corridor, then you’ll find a room filled with equipment.’ Except there never was.”

May 11: The Washington Post reports that the group directing the search for WMD, the 75th Exploitation Task Force, is planning to leave Iraq.

May 13: The Washington Post’s Harold Meyerson calls pre-war information “faith-based intelligence.” But Kenneth Timmerman, writing in Insight magazine, says that only liberals care whether Iraq actually had WMD.

May 13: The New York Times reports that “suspicious trailers,” which could be mobile bioweapons labs have been found—but they contain no biological materials.

May 17: The Washington Post reports that White House communication director Dan Bartlett believes there is proof that Iraq had a WMD program because “the U.N. Security Council passed a resolution that confirmed it.”

May 22: Peter Jennings, introducing a story on ABC-TV’s nightly news, summed up the record. “U.S. intelligence officials say they have concluded that the two tractor-trailers, which they found in northern Iraq during the war, are laboratories for making biological weapons. But they have found absolutely no trace of biological agents in them. Nine weeks after the war began, there is no tangible evidence of any biological or chemical weapons in Iraq at all.”