We've found the weapons!

[jonb]

FINALLY! After a year in Iraq, 500 American lives, hundreds of billions of dollars (That's billion with a B.), and international relations wrecked, we have Bush's triumph!

See! He was right! The Iraqis possessed a crude ballpoint pen drawings of something that looks like a weapon of some kind.

Yes, after all this time, this is all the Bushies have to show for it. A few pages of arcane scribblings.

 

[13788]

hawl: Jon didn't mention whatever is the current accepted number of American casualties, but here's an interesting article about this aging "fiasco of monstrous proportions"-www.smh.com.au/articles/2003/06/19/1055828406933.html. Here's a nice endorsement that joins my old one(s) here, plus a concise overview of the subject-www.johnkerry.com/honesty/, and for those who need even more-www.guerrillanews.com/intelligence/doc3678.html.

 

[13788]

SpeedoGuy: Saddam is a sneaky dude! He must have stolen the original sketches of the nuclear weapons I designed during boring classes in high school.



SG

 

[bigstr8bulge]

Follow the link, it's leading CNN now:

http://www.cnn.com/2004/WORLD/meast/01/10/sprj.irq.chemicals/index.html

And if these were hidden in some dried out swamp, looks like everything the CIA has been saying about them being hidden all over the country is very likely true....

And for all the Bush-bashers, let's not forget the 50 million freed Afghans and Iraqis that have come about by our decisive action. I know it won't stop your whining, but when Bush is handily re-elected the judgement of most Americans will help validate the war on terrorism.

 

[jonb]

Mortar shells that are BELIEVED to contain blister agents. In other words, they haven't tested it yet.

Saddam's great at hiding weapons in theoretical universes.

 

[13788]

Inwood: I wonder how long it takes to test a shell to see if it has a blister agent in it? Anybody know?

 

[jonb]

[quote author=Inwood link=board=99;num=1073627242;start=0#5 date=01/10/04 at 18:55:51]I wonder how long it takes to test a shell to see if it has a blister agent in it? Anybody know?[/quote]
Not that long. That's why I'm surprised they haven't tested their theory before going to the press. Probably because everyone knows it'll come up negative.

 

[13788]

jerkin4-10: wonder how long it took to come up with the idea for some cryptic drawings...scan them...and come up with such boring dialog and un-interesting responses?
anyone?

 

[13788]

hawl: [quote author=jerkin4-10 link=board=99;num=1073627242;start=0#7 date=01/10/04 at 19:49:17]wonder how long it took to come up with the idea for some cryptic drawings...scan them...and come up with such boring dialog and un-interesting responses?
anyone?[/quote]Well, if you're interested, this article is the source of these drawings that are being bandied about on the net-www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A60340-2004Jan6.html. I kid you not  :-[.

 

[13788]

jerkin4-10: NFW!...hehehe...thats funny

 

[13788]

longtimelurker: I cannot say about how difficult it would be to extract the contents from a mortar shell, but blister agents would most likely be analysed by some sort of Gas-Chromatography experiment, which would take a couple of hours. It's easier if they have a faint idea of what it's likely to be in the first place, obviously.

 

[13788]

Inwood: The news reports this morning about the 36 shells found in a swamp are saying the army is downplaying the find. It seems yes these are probably blister agent shells but are most likely left over from the Iran-Iraq war and are at least ten years old.

These are weapons that have been known about for some time and which several countries, probably including the USA, supplied materials to Iraq to build them during that war. Not exactly proof that WMD are buried all over Iraq.

Still it is possible that WMDs will be found. However it seems that the "intelligence" that the administration based it's decisions on was based on lies told by Iraqi scientents to Saddam's regime. They couldn't build the weapons because the sanctions put in place by the UN apparently were more effective then given credit. But it is kind of ironic that the fear Saddam spread through his country ended up producing his downfall.

And yes at first I thought jonb had drawn these images himself. But these are the actual drawings found. And I do wonder how long it took some of the posters to come up with their post and how long it took them to eat it.

 

[bigstr8bulge]

[quote author=Inwood link=board=99;num=1073627242;start=0#11 date=01/11/04 at 07:44:01]The news reports this morning about the 36 shells found in a swamp are saying the army is downplaying the find. It seems yes these are probably blister agent shells but are most likely left over from the Iran-Iraq war and are at least ten years old.

These are weapons that have been known about for some time and which several countries, probably including the USA, supplied materials to Iraq to build them during that war. Not exactly proof that WMD are buried all over Iraq.

Still it is possible that WMDs will be found. However it seems that the "intelligence" that the administration based it's decisions on was based on lies told by Iraqi scientents to Saddam's regime. They couldn't build the weapons because the sanctions put in place by the UN apparently were more effective then given credit. But it is kind of ironic that the fear Saddam spread through his country ended up producing his downfall.

And yes at first I thought jonb had drawn these images himself. But these are the actual drawings found. And I do wonder how long it took some of the posters to come up with their post and how long it took them to eat it.[/quote]

Good comments Inwood.

 

[jay_too]

This link provides some background [and documentation] on historical U.S. policy toward WMDs and their use by Iraq. It is not a pretty story.
http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB82/

Of course, I do not know how the shells with chemical agents got in the swamp; but I can guess that a leak in one or more shells was detected and it was decided that it would be easier to dispose of the lot rather than keep monitoring. Some blistering agents are hydrolyzed so a wet disposal site might be relatively benign AND cheap disposal method. OR perhaps, it was part of the war on the swamp arabs that saddam conducted, you know, poison the water.

As for hidden storage, in a swamp, ""Nah." Water is corrosive to metals and waters in wetlands are acidic so it defies technical sense to propose that these shells were stored/hidden in a swamp for later use. Oh wait, I forgot this is the Bush administration.

jay

 

[jonb]

What's bad, though, is that Bush and his cabinet were discussing war with Iraq even before January 2001.

The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace has released a report showing basically that everything Bush and Company has said is a lie.

 

[13788]

Ineligible: The shells were shown on the news here last night, and they looked very corroded - certainly not in usable condition.