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Foj
Citizen
Username: Foger
Post Number: 1545
Registered: 9-2004
| | Posted on Wednesday, June 21, 2006 - 10:29 pm: | 
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WASHINGTON — The United States has found 500 chemical weapons in Iraq since 2003, and more weapons of mass destruction are likely to be uncovered, two Republican lawmakers said Wednesday.
"We have found weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, chemical weapons," Sen. Rick Santorum, R-Pa., said in a quickly called press conference late Wednesday afternoon.
Reading from a declassified portion of a report by the National Ground Intelligence Center, a Defense Department intelligence unit, Santorum said: "Since 2003, coalition forces have recovered approximately 500 weapons munitions which contain degraded mustard or sarin nerve agent. Despite many efforts to locate and destroy Iraq's pre-Gulf War chemical munitions, filled and unfilled pre-Gulf War chemical munitions are assessed to still exist."...
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,200499,00.html |
S.L.K. 2.0
Citizen
Username: Scrotisloknows
Post Number: 1755
Registered: 10-2005
| | Posted on Thursday, June 22, 2006 - 8:37 am: |
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Ooops, Faux News reported it so it must be a lie....
/sarcasm off...
-SLK |
Nohero
Supporter
Username: Nohero
Post Number: 5530
Registered: 10-1999
| | Posted on Thursday, June 22, 2006 - 8:46 am: |
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No, it's true - Santorum is claiming that WMDs were found.
He's completely wrong, of course. I think some defense department official has already stated that the old shell casings and debris that Santorum is talking about, are not the WMDs which were the reason for the invasion. |
Bob K
Supporter
Username: Bobk
Post Number: 11903
Registered: 5-2001
| | Posted on Thursday, June 22, 2006 - 9:02 am: |
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The key phrase in the report is "recovered approximately 500 weapons munitions which contain degraded mustard or sarin nerve agent'. Note the use of the word "degraded". Also, as admitted in the report, the guv'mint has known about these shells since 2003 and until Bushes latest political blitz to regain support, didn't consider them part of any stockpile. Now they do. Black is white and white is black in the Rovian world.
Fascinating. |
dave23
Citizen
Username: Dave23
Post Number: 1840
Registered: 5-2001
| | Posted on Thursday, June 22, 2006 - 9:24 am: |
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What a load of Santorum. |
Foj
Citizen
Username: Foger
Post Number: 1592
Registered: 9-2004
| | Posted on Tuesday, June 27, 2006 - 9:36 pm: |
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SO do I have this straight, this story was a bunch of BS?
Just askin.............. |
Nohero
Supporter
Username: Nohero
Post Number: 5549
Registered: 10-1999
| | Posted on Tuesday, June 27, 2006 - 9:39 pm: |
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It was not merely a bunch of BS.
It was an incredibly big, steaming bunch of BS.
Unfortunately, Senator Santorum has decided that he can still underestimate, and insult, the intelligence of the American people, because he actually had a guest column in the Wall Street Journal on Monday, continuing to hype this. |
3ringale
Citizen
Username: Threeringale
Post Number: 268
Registered: 1-2006
| | Posted on Wednesday, June 28, 2006 - 7:16 am: |
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Thursday, June 22, 2006
Rick Santorum’s WMDs
As everyone probably knows by now, Sen. Rick Santorum (R-PA) held a press conference today, revealing portions of a declassified report that indicates that 500 shells containing degraded mustard or sarin nerve gas have been found in Iraq since 2003.
Over at Bettnet.com, my friend and colleague Chris Check and I have engaged Domenico Bettinelli, Jr., in a debate about whether this has any bearing at all on the question of whether the war in Iraq is a just war. Dom, who has supported the war, writes:
Okay, wait does this make it a just war now? It shows the difficulty of assessing an ongoing war when you don’t have all the facts before you.
Chris and I, of course, have both argued that it does not.
If you’re interested in the just-war discussion (or even want to take part), please go over to Dom’s weblog. I don’t want to get into the question of just-war theory in this post, however. Instead, I’m more interested in the “revelation” as it pertains to the secular justification for the war, because there is no doubt that both supporters and opponents of the war have used the perceived presence or absence of WMDs to justify their respective positions.
So, what does the document that Senator Santorum released today tell us? You can find a PDF of it here, but to make it easier to discuss, I’ll reproduce the text of the key page below. Under the date of 21 June 2006, we find:
Subject: Iraqi Chemical Munitions
Purpose: This summary provides an unclassified overview of chemical munitions recovered in Iraq since May 2004.
Key Points:
— Since 2003 Coalition forces have recovered approximately 500 weapons munitions which contain degraded mustard or sarin nerve agent.
— Despite many efforts to locate and destroy Iraq’s pre-Gulf War chemical munitions, filled and unfilled pre-Gulf War chemical munitions are assessed to still exist.
— Pre-Gulf War Iraqi chemical weapons could be sold on the black market. Use of these weapons by terrorists or insurgent groups would have implications for Coalition forces in Iraq. The possibility of use outside Iraq cannot be ruled out.
— The most likely munitions remaining are sarin and mustard-filled projectiles.
— The purity of the agent inside the munitions depends on many factors, including the manufacturing process, potential additives, and environmental storage conditions. While agents degrade over time, chemical warfare agents remain hazardous and potentially lethal.
— It has been reported in open press that insurgents and Iraqi groups desire to acquire and use chemical weapons.
N.B.: The underlines in the points of the memo were not placed there typographically by the author of the document but were drawn in by hand, presumably by someone connected with the press conference today. (If anyone has further information on who drew the underlines, I would appreciate hearing it.)
So, what does this memo tell us that we didn’t know yesterday? The only somewhat surprising piece of information in the first point is that 500 shells have been recovered since 2003. Anyone who has paid any attention to the news over the past three years already knew that, as early as 2003, some shells containing degraded mustard or sarin nerve agent had been recovered. Reports of new finds have popped up every few months. All this document has done is provide an aggregate number.
Think about this: If the individual finds over the past three years haven’t given the Bush administration cause to proclaim that the WMD claim was, in fact, justified, how does the aggregate total of those individual finds now suddenly qualify as vindication?
Is it because 500 is such a large number? (Unlike, say, 2,500, which we’ve been assured is a very small one.) Well, here’s some news: 500 is not much at all. Chris Check, a former Marine artillery officer who served in the Gulf during the Gulf War, tells me that 500 shells represents the ordnance that one unit might go through in one hour.
Oddly, Saddam had far more than one hour to use these weapons against U.S. troops, and yet it appears that he didn’t use a single one, even though he knew as well as the rest of the world that the ultimate aim of the war was to remove him from power, so he had little to lose and no real reason to save the weapons for the future.
Why didn’t he use them? He certainly has no moral qualms about their use, as the infamous gassing of the Kurds showed. One possibility is that he, and the Iraqi military broadly speaking, didn’t actually have them in their possession. As the document points out, these were pre-Gulf War munitions. Many may have been hidden at the time, and later forgotten about; many may have been absconded with; many may have been decommissioned and were awaiting destruction, because the military knew that the chemical weapons had degraded.
If the Russians could lose over 100 suitcase nukes (according to Russian Gen. Alexander Lebed), is it really hard to believe that it is possible that Saddam didn’t use these weapons because he didn’t have possession of them?
The use of “pre-Gulf War” in the second and third points is important. Those in the administration who claimed that Saddam had massive quantities of WMDs weren’t talking about 500 shells of mustard or sarin gas that were over 12 years old. They claimed that he had continued to manufacture and otherwise acquire chemical and biological (remember anthrax?) weapons after the Gulf War, and some even implied that he might actually be in possession of, or close to producing, a nuclear weapon. Nothing in this document lends even the slightest support to those claims. (Indeed, biological and nuclear weapons are not even mentioned.)
Again, it was the administration’s assessment before the war that chemical and biological weapons existed in Iraq. The contention in point two of this document is that “pre-Gulf War chemical munitions are assessed to still exist,” and point four amplifies this by noting that the “most likely munitions remaining are sarin and mustard-filled projectiles.” Thus, this represents an important step backward from the administration’s pre-war claims.
All three sentences of point three are indisputable. The second sentence only comes into play, however, because we went to war. As for the “possibility of use outside Iraq,” saying that it “cannot be ruled out” is awfully guarded compared with administration claims before the war. Could that have anything to do with the realization that all we’ve found so far are degraded munitions, which, according to point five, are only “potentially lethal,” though they “remain hazardous”? The mention of the role that “environmental storage conditions” plays in determining the “purity of the agent” may be a clue here.
And finally, point six, by definition, was already known before Senator Santorum’s press conference today.
If this recently declassified document really doesn’t tell us anything we didn’t already know—and, in fact, at some points, seems to undermine earlier administration claims—why is Senator Santorum so excited about it? Could it have anything to do, as Chris Check suggests, with his standings in the polls? As of today, his pro-life Democratic opponent, Robert P. Casey, Jr., the son of the wildly popular former Democratic pro-life governor of Pennsylvania, is 18 points ahead of Santorum, with only 12 percent undecided. Moreover, Santorum has an approval rating of only 38 percent, just slightly ahead of President Bush’s 34.
I know; I know. Senator Santorum is a patriot, and I’m an unpatriotic conservative even to raise the question. Still, it does make you wonder, doesn’t it?
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
FOOTNOTE: Despite my disagreements with Dom over the war in Iraq, I read his weblog religiously. It is, in my estimation, one of the best weblogs for Catholic news and commentary, and it occupies a prominent place in my copy of NetNewsWire (which, if you use a Mac, should occupy a prominent place in your Dock). Dom’s a good writer and a hard-hitting reporter. (Just don’t mention the war!)
For the last few years, he’s been the editor of Catholic World Report, but his job is coming to an end with the July issue. Please keep him, his wife, and his newborn daughter in your prayers, and, if you have any lines on potential employment for Dom, please let him know.
http://www.chroniclesmagazine.org/cgi-bin/rockfordfiles.cgi/The%20World%20Beyond /Iraq/2006/06/22/Rick_Santorum_s_WMDs
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Foj
Citizen
Username: Foger
Post Number: 1594
Registered: 9-2004
| | Posted on Wednesday, June 28, 2006 - 9:03 pm: |
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WOW, I thought that since the story turned out to be false, I would get slammed. Kinda like when I posted another story that truned out to be false.
Interesting post, Threeringale. Some place I have some info on how long agents last in a 155mm shell, US ordinance by the way. Most of the 155mm shells we sold Saddam IIRc were from the mid or late 1980's, so it very likely they are closer to 20 yrs old. & very useless. |
tom
Citizen
Username: Tom
Post Number: 5189
Registered: 5-2001
| | Posted on Wednesday, June 28, 2006 - 10:14 pm: |
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I remember here on this board back in 2003 when a single damaged shell was found in a ditch somewhere in Iraq, that was sufficient justification for some of the neo-con cabal, who vociferously insisted that the WMDs were found. The official talking point at the time seemed to be "how many do you need? Is there a number?"
You could look it up.
Interesting fact that 500 intact ones is about an hour's supply for just one unit.
But as the author implies about Santorum, it's all about desperation. |
Foj
Citizen
Username: Foger
Post Number: 1597
Registered: 9-2004
| | Posted on Wednesday, June 28, 2006 - 11:58 pm: |
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Tom, I remember the event. What do you think about certain MOLers slamming me for posting the Jason Leopold article on ROVE WILL BE INDICTED, when it turned out to be false, and now that Santoriums claims are found to be false......
Not a word from said MOLers.
I must be over-reacting. LOL. |
tom
Citizen
Username: Tom
Post Number: 5195
Registered: 5-2001
| | Posted on Thursday, June 29, 2006 - 12:20 am: |
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Yeah, but when Straw wakes up in the morning he'll tell you it's boring! |
Dr. Winston O'Boogie
Citizen
Username: Casey
Post Number: 2198
Registered: 8-2003
| | Posted on Thursday, June 29, 2006 - 8:55 am: |
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I guess the question is, at what point does a cache represent a weapon of mass destruction? A couple hundred rusting shells containing degraded chemicals, without missles to send them anywhere hardly qualify as weapons that could cause "mass" destruction. |
3ringale
Citizen
Username: Threeringale
Post Number: 271
Registered: 1-2006
| | Posted on Thursday, June 29, 2006 - 9:15 am: |
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Leon Hadar has coined a new word:
And here is my addition to American political vocabulary
Santorumism: "Making fool of yourself while operating under the assumption that you can fool all of the people all of the time." But, hey, who knows? Maybe this is going to work. Your Average American "reads" a headline "Senator: WMD Discovered in Iraq" and that piece of "info" gets absorbed into his "mind." He mentions is to his buddy, Average American II and before you know there is the following headline: "According to new polls: More Americans now believe that Saddam had WMDs." Average Americans III, IV, etc. read that headline and the "Faith Based Community" wins another victory.
http://globalparadigms.blogspot.com/2006/06/santorumism.html
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notehead
Supporter
Username: Notehead
Post Number: 3525
Registered: 5-2001
| | Posted on Thursday, June 29, 2006 - 9:28 am: |
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Foj, I think we were so bummed that Rove wasn't indicted that we didn't have any energy left to slam you for giving us bad info.  |
Foj
Citizen
Username: Foger
Post Number: 1602
Registered: 9-2004
| | Posted on Thursday, June 29, 2006 - 9:23 pm: |
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But Notey, I was hoping the same folk who DID slam me on the Rove thing .. would then slam me on the Sanitorioum WMD thing, right? that would only be fair...... right? |
Nohero
Supporter
Username: Nohero
Post Number: 5561
Registered: 10-1999
| | Posted on Thursday, June 29, 2006 - 10:25 pm: |
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Foj -
I would be happy to slam you, if you want.
Please indicate which term you want to be used, in slamming you -__ Poopyhead
__ Assclown
__ Pansy
__ Creep
__ Prick
__ Jerk
__ Lib We will then try to slam you, when you do something that needs "slamming". |
Foj
Citizen
Username: Foger
Post Number: 1607
Registered: 9-2004
| | Posted on Thursday, June 29, 2006 - 10:51 pm: |
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I can be an assclown, and it gets front page coverage, sometimes. Albeit, the Montclair Times. |
Nohero
Supporter
Username: Nohero
Post Number: 5562
Registered: 10-1999
| | Posted on Thursday, June 29, 2006 - 11:15 pm: |
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The rest of us can only wish to be recognized as "assclowns" by the Montclair Times. |
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