How's that ole search coming along there johnheath? nyuk nyuk nyuk US arms experts 'leaving Iraq' http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/3018063.stm The United States force directing the search for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq is pulling out, according to The Washington Post. The 75th Exploitation Task Force is dismantling its operations for a likely departure in June, says the newspaper, after the group failed to find any biological and chemical weapons. Members of the team told the newspaper that they no longer expected to find such stocks, and that they had consistently found targets identified by Washington to be inaccurate, or to have been looted and burned. The force will hand over to a new team, the Iraq Survey Group. But, according to the Washington Post, the number of weapons experts in the new outfit has been significantly reduced and some units have already sent home as many as a third of their original complement. "We thought we would be much more gainfully employed, or intensively employed, than we were," said Navy Commander David Beckett of the Defence Threat Reduction Agency. Evidence 'important' US President George W Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair had used the alleged threat posed by Iraq's suspected weapons of mass destruction as the main justification for waging war. Correspondents say that while the failure to discover such weapons may not matter to many Americans, in Europe - where many people strongly opposed the war - the issue is likely to become a political one. Why are we doing any planned targets? We know they're empty Richard L Gonzales Last week, the commander of UK forces in the Iraq conflict Air Marshal Brian Burridge said he had "no doubt" that evidence of the weapons would be found. He accepted that it was "very important" that such proof was uncovered, in order to show the public the concerns that prompted the war were genuine. However, Army Colonel Richard McPhee, who will close down the task force next month, told the Washington Post if Iraq thought of using such weapons, "there had to have been something to use. And we haven't found it". "Books will be written on that in the intelligence community for a long time," he added. Army Colonel Robert Smith, who leads the site assessment teams from the Defense Threat Reduction Agency, said task force leaders no longer "think we're going to find chemical rounds sitting next to a gun." He added, "That's what we came here for, but we're past that." The UK's dossier on Iraq's banned weapons (Al-Hussein missiles) US Central Command began the war with a list of 19 top weapons sites - only two remain to be searched. Another list enumerated 68 top "non-WMD sites," without known links to special weapons but judged to have the potential to offer clues. Of those, the tally at midweek showed 45 surveyed without success. "Why are we doing any planned targets?" said Army Chief Warrant Officer Richard L Gonzales, leader of Mobile Exploitation Team Alpha, reports the Washington Post. "Answer me that. We know they're empty."
Wow. This must be proof that there were never any weapons there. Must be, right? This could take months. There are echoes of them there all over the place, and Timing still fails to realize that enough sarin to murder every man, woman, and child on the planet could be hidden in a 25'x25'x10' bunker buried a dozen feet underground in the middle of the desert... It could take months. Of course, Timing is not interested in the actual hunt, he is merely interested in slanting the story to fit his view. He fails to point out that the 75th ETF was never intended to be used for sustained operations, and that the follow on group will be larger and more diversified, with greater resources, than the initial search operation. But we're not interested in the hunt here, are we? Just the slant.
Here: Germs of Truth By Russell Seitz The favorite subject of those who opposed the war in Iraq is the coalition's failure to find the 4,000 barrels of chemical and biological warfare agents that President Bush invoked in justifying it. However, they tend to ignore the less convenient facts of the matter. There is a world of hurt in 500 tons of such malignant stuff, but in such a modest volume - roughly a twenty-five foot cube - the trucks carrying it can disappear into a fair sized traffic jam. War gases and most of the chemicals that go into them are flammable. Indeed, America is disposing of the nerve gas once present in its arsenals by incineration. Biological agents are even more heat sensitive. When heated past 700 Fahrenheit, they become hard to tell from burnt toast. 500 tons is a drop in the bucket compared to the volume of burning oil that went up in smoke during the war. What proved useless as an aircraft deterrent may still have exemplified the principle of a dual use technology: Oil trench fires make dandy funeral pyres for immolating the evidence of non-nuclear ambition. If the corpus delecti has already become part of the smog inventory over the Indian Ocean, score one for Saddam. The administration will feel the heat for as long as it takes to dig up Iraq's national stockpile of sand. The truth will come out, but even with help from liberated scientists, this could be a big dig. The Democrats and diplomats demanding to know the fate of Iraq's slippery arsenal just don't want to hear how many suburbs of Ur of the Chaldees have eluded archaeological recovery for the last million days. Somebody may turn up a plague infested carcass chucked into Baghdad by the Mongols in 1258 before the modern skunk juice comes to light. A lot of the chemical munitions that went unused in World War II are still rotting on the bottom of the Baltic. To understand the hunt for contraband weapons today, consider what followed the last Gulf War. In its aftermath the problem was less finding the evidence than recognizing it for what it was - no single inspector was familiar with the bewildering variety of good, bad, and ugly technology that Saddam's technicians had acquired. This led to vast confusion and a feeding frenzy among policy analysts. Many feared the worst. Along with a nuclear weapons program, UN inspectors found an arsenal of chemical weapons and dual use materials. A lot of it could be equally well applied to the growth and culture of lethal organisms or toxins, or the production of life saving antibiotics. There are even some biological culture medium ingredients that could be harmlessly employed to augment the formula of baby milk. Looking over what others and I wrote in those heady days, one finds some themes that are being repeated. And others that are in danger of being forgotten, if not deliberately repressed. Iraq, like Pakistan, had sent its best and brightest west to get PhD's in nuclear science and chemical engineering. These young people showed a lot of initiative in reviving ways and means of enriching uranium that had largely been forgotten by the existing nuclear powers. Between 1992 and 2002, these people didn't go away - they grew older and more knowledgeable. The inspectors who arrived in 1992 found gadgets for uranium enrichment on an industrial scale. Analysts' jaws dropped as they realized that some Iraqi expertise stemmed from efforts to publicize proliferation risks in order to stem them. That these technologies were now obsolete did not mean that they did not work. Publishing the blueprints of old Manhattan Project facilities proved to be a handy shortcut on the road to nuclear ubiquity. Following the Iraqis into the pre-history of atomic weapons, we found another risk: neptunium. This third nuclear fuel languished in obscurity for decades, but tens of tons of it, like plutonium, were produced in the course of generating nuclear power. But while plutonium from spent fuel is carefully safeguarded as weapons material, the neptunium's weapons potential went unrealized. It collected in repositories whose main line of defense was that their contents were too hot to handle. But such radioactivity fades away in a matter of decades: people live in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, too. By the time of the Gulf War, some vintage neptunium had cooled down a thousand fold, and become fit for weapons use. But this problem went undiscovered by the International Atomic Energy Agency, and its director Hans Blix. No IAEA safeguards existed in 1990, when an examination of the physics revealed the problem. The response to the publication of the facts was immediate - a fusillade of denial. Letters and articles appeared saying neptunium posed no threat at all. I found this baffling, but lacking additional data I assumed that my numbers were outclassed by classified ones. In fact, the numbers were correct - the denials were a disinformation operation designed to buy time for the IAEA to rectify its failure of oversight, and the Department of Energy to circle its wagons around undefended tons of weapons grade neptunium. Last fall the DOE brought the first neptunium fueled nuclear reactor to criticality: an unsuspected nuclear weapons material had become a source of nuclear energy. Another irony may be playing out today in Iraq. Just as we lost track of a major nuclear proliferation hazard for decades, we tend to forget the symmetry of dual use technologies and materials. Chemicals with innocent or even life-saving uses may become feed stocks for nerve gas manufacture or biological warfare. But some times a cigar is a cigar. A few weeks ago, troops clad cap a pied in sweltering CBW protective gear probed containers in the Iraqi desert for nerve gas. The false alarms produced by empty insecticide drums were not surprising, because organophosphate nerve gases are an offshoot of organophosphate insecticide research. This raises a question doves dislike: were Iraq's dual-use chemicals disposed of the old-fashioned way, by using them to manufacture mundane agrochemicals? Iraq possesses a full-blown phosphate fertilizer industry (like America's, it produces uranium as a by-product) and all it needs to refine petroleum and manufacture organic chemicals. Some chemicals can be incorporated into organophosphate nerve gases and insecticides alike: little wonder chemical warfare test kits often give false positives. Just as the transformation of neptunium into nuclear reactor fuel does not reduce the risk of the element's weaponization, the disappearance of nerve gas precursors into benign chemical factories can equally signify innocence. Or cunning. Dual use chemicals have innocent uses by definition, but profitable use is another matter. That's why cheaper or better single use chemicals dominate the chemical economy. The suave Iraqi CBW general who claims its weapons exist no more can't recall just why all those dual use chemicals were acquired or what became of them. The burning question of the day is less where they are, than why Iraq sometimes bought both cheap and excellent single use compounds and mediocre and expensive ones as well? A germ of truth is the best bodyguard a big lie can have. http://www.techcentralstation.com/1051/defensewrapper.jsp?PID=1051-350&CID=1051-050803A
tree...we agree that they could still be found, and you already know that my opposition to the war wasn't based on finding/not finding them...but I have an honest question for you. You were among the more adamant a while back that the WMD finds were pretty imminent, and you worried in here about chem strikes on the troops in the 1st days of the war...and your theories about why they weren't found mostly involved forctors ( knocked out deployment capabilities, SH subords refusing to obey firing, etc.) which couldn't explain their continued non-discovery...so I ask you, in all honesty, and I won't take a 'yes' as an admission that you were wrong about the war, but honestly...not a set up... Are you at all surprised at the non-discovery up till now, based on your expectations ( based on WH reports) going in? Not are you more surprised today than yesterday, but if a week before the war we would have told you that 2 months later we'd still be looking, honestly, wouldn't you have been surprised? Do you see a shift in the WMD stance, away from them being poised to inflict destruction to possibly barried or shipped off to another country? And does the WH admission to have over'emphasised' the WMD aspect, coupled with the non-discovery, and this latest pull out give you even a smidgen of doubt that they were maybe not as big of a deal as claimed? Ok, three questions... Please don't get all defensive, if you don't say yes to any of the above, there is no need to explain why not. I am honestly just interested in how open you are to alternative possibilites playing themselves out.
Inevitable, not imminent. Big difference. I actually explained before the war why I thought it likely that they would *not* be used, but that is a different story... Some of the theories did, and some did not. I'd say that "They were buried prewar" explains pretty well their non-discovery... All of my theories were just those: theories. They were all plausible given available information at the time, and some of them - in particular the "They're buried/hidden" one is still plausible. The most probable at this point. Honestly, I did not give their disposition much thought before the war. I believed they were there (still do), and didn't really care about where they were. That was a question to be answered after the war, and I fully believe that given time it will be. If I'd have thought about it a little, no. It's a big country, and there's absolutely no incentive for the Iraqis to make them easy to find. On the contrary, they have every incentive to make them very difficult to find. One of the great things about WMD is that it is relatively easy to make them very difficult to find. When I talk about a small unmarked bunker in the middle of the desert that maybe only a half dozen people know about, I am being serious. For what it's worth, Debka is saying that they are buried in the Bekaa Valley. Sometimes Debka is right about that kind of stuff, and sometimes it is wrong, but that would be a very bad outcome if true... No. Personally, I have no problem with the WH overemphasizing the issue; I do believe that they believe strongly that the weapons are there somewhere, so it's not as if they are lying. They were just talking up one aspect of the war that everyone could understand. Toppling Saddam's regime was always the main goal - mission accomplished. The WMD are not really relevant if he is not in power. This is what many Americans failed to understand - that the Iraqi leadership was the problem, not necessarily the WMD. They were just a symptom. But most Americans couldn't get that, so the admin talked up something they could understand... No, I don't have a problem with that. As for being open to alternative possibilities - there are a few. I suppose it is possible that Saddam destroyed the WMD prewar in an effort to make himself look clean, and there is evidence that at least some were destroyed. Is it possible that they all were? I suppose, although it would be highly illogical for the Iraqis to fail to document such an act and tell the inspectors. But that alternative is at least possible... There is no possibility that they never existed; their existence is a matter of historical fact from the UNSCOM period. I was rather amused that at least 5 people chose that option on my poll on the subject...
You can stamp your feet and speak on what you think I believe all day long and you'll still be left unable to controvert the current reality. It's become obvious that this administration lied about what it allegedly knew. Your deciding not to embrace that fact won't change it's accuracy. BTW I didn't fail to point out anything, I simply posted an article regarding the situation. It wasn't an editorial, I'll leave those slanted views to the spin doctors like you and johnheath to post. I'm sure you won't let me down.
I'm more concerned about that if there is WMDs, then in what hands are they now? Not to pass judgement on anything, IMO this war has done everything to provoke Hussein to either destroy/hide the alleged WMDs or to disperse them to hostile countries, terrorists, and underground organizations... it's like beating up an unchained mad dog and expect it would just sit and lick you feet. If Hussein has any intention of retaliation the best way for him to do so is through the terrorists. Stealth, no WMD retaliation and won't justify America's invasion had it not been exposed. Think how ironic it would be if one day America is attacked by WMDs from terrorists and in reality those came from Hussein as a result of being attacked by Mr.Bush and cos. The outcome of this war is still pending.
Or think about how ironic it would be if somebody drove a u-haul loaded with explosives and parked it near a federal building (or WTC like building). Or if someone with plastic box cutters hi-jacked a plane and flew it into a WTC like building, Pentagon, or White House. All in all, low tech terrorists are probably the ones we need to be on the look out for.
Timing: The current reality is that we have not yet found any WMD, although we have found echoes of them everywhere (see 111chase111's story fotr an example). That is the reality. You believe that the reality is that they never existed, correct? If so, then your version of reality is different from everyone else's, including established history and the UN's. But you're not interested in reality, are you? You never have been. What exactly did they lie about? Please be specific here, and use evidence - direct evidence - to support your accusations. Since it's obvious, this should not be difficult... Unless you're just blowing smoke out of your ass again. You have given me no facts to embrace, hug, kiss, or otherwise show affection with, so exactly what do you mean by this? Please give me some facts so I don't feel so lonely. By failing to point out what I had to, you attempted to present a slanted view of the reality (and you did it again in this post). Am I supposed to let that slide? No, it was a poorly edited job of reporting that failed to tell the whole story. I understand the difference. Look, I thought we established long ago that you did not need any evidence to support your arguments? That's fine, and everyone can take them for what they're worth. Jonheath I am sure will keep coming up with substantive reports on this issue, as will I. Right up until the day when they are found. You are free to keep throwing your conspiracy theories around as much as you like, just as we are free to counter them with logic, evidence, and reality. rezdawg: Ah yes. This must be why their oil is being used to power/run the country instead of going to our oil companies, and also why it is to be held in trust until the next Iraqi government decides what they want to do with it... Sorry, that deserves a . Panda: Aha! Finally someone with a sensible concern/question... I was beginning to think this thread would simply become another conspiracy-driven BBS casualty... This is actually a possibility that scares me too. Debka is saying that they were relocated to the Bekaa Valley via Syria prewar, and if true that is a scary thought. We know what's in the Bekaa, right? Hizbollah, and Hamas training camps, with an Al Qaeda presence to boot. Debka says that the weapons are buried and that the Syrians know where they are, and if they know then they could direct Hizbollah to the site. Scary thought... Personally, if I were in charge and thought that story true, I'd have the site surrounded by the 75th Ranger Regiment right now... That is a possibility that can't be ruled out until the weapons are found, and it is a scary possibility. No Worries: I would say that we need to pay more attention to the low tech terrorists than we currently do, so you are correct here (did I say that?). They should recieve the same amount of attention as the ones with higher aspirations - they are all a threat. You can't just go after the low tech guys while ignoring the big ticket guys anymore than you can do it the other way around. You have to go after all of them.
This is not news unless you really believed Colin Powell's speech at the UN Security Council. This is obviously just an extension of Rumsfeld's policy of less boots on the ground. It's worked for the invasion, current occupation may need less boots , it's gotta work on the search for WMD. I think it's based on the same logic as the tax cuts, less government spending will lead to better results, unless the government spends money on a company owned by friends of the administration.
I think it's based on the same logic as the tax cuts, less government spending will lead to better results, unless the government spends money on a company owned by friends of the administration. Can't agree more. Even when it comes to defense and security. Spending on more troops or better pay or better education and health benefits for the troops, who regardless of color are made up of the non GOP contributing class, are just another form of distasteful welfare to these guys. They hate it. Now wmd and other weapons that they can make a buck on, they love those. Got to hand it to these guys. They run for office because they claim to hate government. However, they only hate government it when they are getting paid by it.
Exagerrating and omitting intelligence reports is the same as lying in my book. This administration has been guilty of that as well as being completely shortsighted and having no realistic comprehension of longterm consequences of their actions. Treeman you have been very guilty of only posting slanted articles that never tell the full story so I'm not sure why you're even bothering to use that argument to illustrate your point. I'm not sure why you're even bringing up the subject of chemical weapons anyways. They are low tech, and a terrorist could make his own here in the U.S. rather than go through the hassle of importing them if they really wanted to use them. You may remember that cult in Japan that nerve gassed the subway in Tokyo if you want an example.
I think Aun Shinrikyo spent about a billion dollars IIRC and the sarin gas in a glass jar was the best they could do - it's too hard to weaponize chem/bio without a good delivery system, they couldn't buy a bomber or artillery pieces. It may be easier to do something like time activated remote missile attacks on a chemical refinery to try to recreate Bhopal here in one of the chemical corridors here in northern California or southeast Texas.
