Well, that's it. Authorities have found a single artillery round with sarin contained within. Except apparently it wasn't within for long - it exploded upon inspection and has released a small amount of the agent. No link yet - just heard on the news.
Get ready for "We found the WMD! We found the WMD!" Given the rest of the news today (IGC president killed, Geneva convention called "obsolete" by Bush's lawyer which led to Rumsfeld authorizing torture), this one bullet found a full year after the imminent threat was extinguished (aka "Misssion Accomplished") will surely trump all of it.
Im sure it was just pesticides. New cost effective way versus using a crop duster. Just load the pesticide filled shells into an artillery gun and wa la. Kinda like how they are fond of keeping pesticides buried in bunkers........
Because you know Saddam was developing the awesome might of the Really Big Slingshot, or RBS for short, capable of hitting the US with his thousands of sarin shells that we haven't found yet because he moved them to Syria (confirmation in 72 hours). Thank Jah our wise leaders stopped Saddam before he could deploy his fearsome RBS.
The bit in the NY Times was vague. Do we know yet whether this bomb was manufactured during Saddam's time in charge, or could this be a new bomb that was planted by insurgents?
This apparently happened afew days ago - it's only after the soldiers who were present, became ill that they put 2 and 2 together. The shell apparently was a remnant from the Iran-Iraq war. It was a crude roadside device - which would have been far more effective had it been fired as it was meant to be. It exploding at ground level did relatively little.
Awesome! Our international credibility has been restored, and the world loves us once again!!! I better go get some more vases for all the flowers that will shortly be mailed to everyone in the united states!
Here's the Reuters version: http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=564&e=4&u=/nm/iraq_sarin_dc
That's when Saddam was still a good guy and Iraq was With Us, correct? So it's quite conceivable that the ingredients were supplied by US corporations?
FOX News pretty much lead with that angle when they first started talking about it. In fact, for the half-hour I was at lunch, "WMD" was pretty much the word of the day. Only once did they even mention that the president of the IGC was killed.
The two US companies, and yes it was only 2, that supplied chemical ingredients to Iraq did not provide the chemicals necessary to make Sarin. It's likely that the chemicals came from Europe or Singapore.
You mean they brought some chemicals back in from Syria? Or did somebody leave some behind? I thought with the huge difference between the announced attack and the attack there was plenty of time to get those weapons to Syria. http://nkzone.typepad.com/nkzone/ Japanese newspaper: Syrian technicians killed in Ryongchon explosion The Japanese newspaper Sankei Shimbun published an article on May 7th citing "a military source familiar with Korean Peninsula affairs" who says Syrian technicians were on board the train that exploded in Ryongchon on April 22nd. This person also says that debris was recovered from the train immediately after the explosion by a team wearing protective suits, and that it is possible the train was transporting military cargo. "The article says: there is a strong likelihood that the accident occurred when military materials were being secretly transported between the DPRK and Syria."
If Fox is being accurate, they should be reporting that we have found the "Weapon of Mass Destruction"
I hope that when they pat themselves on the back and tell themselves that they have done a good job that the republicans realize what this means... the insurgents in Iraq had an artillery shell with Sarin in it. Do they have more? I wish that they would have found WMD safe in a bunker somewhere instead of finding it in a road side bomb... that doesn't bode well for our troops.
Like I've said here before, it's a near certainty that there are some old chemical weapons lying around somewhere in Iraq. Even if Saddam had made getting rid of that stuff his top priority in the 90s, I don't think there's any way he could have gotten to all of it. From what I've read, the shell didn't have any identifying markings, and the US military thinks that the people who planted it probably didn't know what was in it. Obviously, this event by itself provides basically zero evidence for the WMD case that the administration laid out before the war. So, I expect the administration to claim that this vindicates the WMD case that was laid out before the war. Hopefully they'll exceed my low expectations, for once.
Meanwhile, back in reality, all signs regarding the chemicals and technology point to this shell being left over from the Iran / Iraq war of the early 1980s, buried for so long that it would never have worked effectively. And it's highly likely that whoever planted it had no idea that it contained any chemicals. Please, Mr. Ailes, back to your regularly scheduled ranting.
If you have a working petrochemical or agricultural industry, you have the ability to make chemical weapons. If not, Saddam buys it from his European buddies.