Kuwait foils smuggling of chemicals, bio warheads from Iraq

Good news to be sure although I'm curious as to what exactly was confiscated.

 

The best part of this is the "$60 million worth." At the going rate of $2 million per chemical warhead and $3 million per biological warhead, this works out to about 15 warheads in all. Gawd bless Kuwaiti security.

 

My bad- word just in from the Afghan WMD dealers: due to a momentary glut in the market, the price of chmeical warheads has dipped to $1.2 million per. Biological warhead prices, however, are holding steady.

 

Unsurprisingly, the link didn't work for me.

And, somehow, this has been kept a secret from CNN.com. I didn't bother looking anywhere else.

Hey, Ian, is Saddam still dead?

 

Assuming there's truth to this report (I'd love some quotes from actual people), this raises some interesting questions.

1. Where did Ian get this originally, because I know he's not reading the Hindustan Times.

2. I wonder how many smuggled warheads got out of Iraq because we didn't have a plan to secure weapons caches?

3. What European country would possible want chem/bio weapons badly enough to have them smuggled out of Iraq?

4. How were smugglers able to find chem/bio weapons that American troops, who have been searching for 4 months, have been unable to locate?

Am I missing anything?

 

You got a link to the DJ story? How about anybody else who picked up the AP story?

 

If you were to applaud this it wouldn't necessarily make you a bad liberal or something.Cut the politics for once and say "alright good job."

 

Link isn't working for me either. Did a Google search for the headline, thinking if it were an AP story I would find several sources. All I got was the Hindustan times. I'll be interested to see how this plays out.

GringoTex -- are you being a smartass, or is that really the going rate for this stuff?

 

Smartass, of course.

Regardless......

1. The question is what caused this arms shipment/sale? Was it Sadaam and his regime or was it possibly the war in Iraq? I don't know this question, but I much rather believe that Sadaam would hold on to WMD indefinitely to protect himself. Regardless, the fact that he had them (if it can be proven in this story) makes Bush more right than he was yesterday (when it was somewhat evident we had found no WMD).

2. 10% chance of US involvment in this. Kuwaiti intelligence officials. Hahahaa. We probably set it up and said, hey Kuwait, watch this stuff over here. They do and low and behold its chemical warheads and biological warheads.

 

I deleted my last post, because the full article finally loaded, and it did mention actual siezure of the warheads. I hope they won't turn out to be empty, like the last batch the US found in Iraq.

 

more lies & the liers that tell them

It’s difficult to confirm the validity of the hindutimes link because www.ap.org makes no reference to this story anywhere on it’s page nor is it on the other major sites. But, this just in….Saddam Hussein is dead, trust me.

what IS getting more attention, is the WaPo contention that Saddam engaged in a deception campaign against exile groups, the UN, the US and her allies into thinking he had a prolific WMD program in order to deter a 1st strike. Israel & the other hostile neighbors wouldn't risk it if they thought they were assured of a counterstrike against population centers


all the news is about Abu Hazim al-Sha'ir, 29-year-old former bin Laden bodyguard, who is believed to be head of Persian Gulf operations. How's that for iraq becoming a haven terrorists.

 

I'm to busy applauding the yellow cake uranium intelligence, the nuclear fule rods and that first batch of WMD warheads we found a couple of months ago.

 

Give him a little credit, at least this time he didn't claim secret sources told him about the WMD operation.

 

This could possibly be true (although I'd like to see another source, or something more substantive). It's always seemed unlikely to me that there were absolutely zero banned weapons left in Iraq, because even assuming that Saddam tried to eliminate everything, I'm not sure he could have tracked them all down. Corrupt dictatorships in poor countries aren't really known for their administrative capacity, so I'd guess it's possible that some enterprising person could have squirreled something away somewhere, to sell to the highest bidder after the end of sanctions.

However, if in fact WMD are currently being smuggled out of Iraq while we can't succesfully find any of them IN Iraq, that would seem to demonstrate that invading Iraq has increased the chance of such weapons falling into the hands of terrorists. Something the British government was warned about before the war - see below.

http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2003/09/12/1063268545415.html

 

[john motson]Oh my! I really don't think he intended THAT! Really, a cracker of a goal .... sadly, at the wrong end. Well! This game really has got everything, hasn't it.[/john motson]

Nice one Ian. So answer the question, erm ... 'dude' ... is Saddam still dead?

 

Well, just like all the other stories (the bio lab RV's, the agricultural chemicals, etc...) we'll just have to wait and see if this is true. Obviously, warheads are a little easier to identify than forensically scraping a bio lab or determining if chemicals are agricultural or possible biological agents. I would expect we would get confirmation within the next 2 days. Until then, no need to rush to judgment either way.

 

There better be at least a dozen CIA or friendly arab intelligence agents setting up "stings" around Iraq to try and snare any fools inquiring about selling or buying WMDs.

And ya know what else?

We better not be hearing squat about them. If a Kuwaiti guard stumbles into the middle of something like that and thinks he caught bad guys from 2 sides...that story better be squashed fast.

 

I'm waiting for that apology to Hans Blix for not finding any WMD in Iraq. What an incompetent fool he was, unlike that nice David Kay.

 

Here's an interview with a British weapons inspector that just came out and backs up my opinion above.

http://us.cnn.com/2003/WORLD/meast/10/02/cnna.iraq.report/index.html

In brief: probably nothing new in Iraq, but also probably some leftovers from the 1980s somewhere in the country- and the less successful we are at finding it, the more likely someone else will.

It's possible that one of the things that the Bush administration was counting on when they justified going the war on flawed WMD evidence is that even if Saddam was doing his best to get rid of the stuff, they could still come up with some stuff that the regime had forgotten about - and pointing to that as a "smoking gun" would be sufficient to satisfy a lot of the American public. Hasn't happened yet, for whatever reason.

 

Was that from when Agoos scored for Portugal?

 

still waiting for confirmation, dude

+24hrs local have passed since this story “broke” yet no major media has touched it.

An exhaustive search for Al-Siyassah, the alleged Kuwaiti paper w/ with the word wmd only gives quotes from the hindutimes story.

More evidence the story was a fake is that http://www.kuwaittimes.net/today/index.shtml makes no mention of this bust. A sotry of that magnitude would certainly lead there. Sorry Charlie, you’ve all been hoodwinked. Trust me.