No Weapons of Mass Destruction in Iraq... WRONG...

Where is the media outcry on this one??

Published on June 8, 2004 By ShadowWar In Misc

Why is there not more media coverage of the fact that our soldiers were attacked with a WMD/ Chemical agent?? I have to say this really shows the control that the left has over or media. Just like you still hear about the prisoner abuse but not the beheading of the American, you don't hear any more about the Chemical Weapon that was used on our troops. Where is the media to say that WMD's were found in Iraq. Oh some same they are old and don't count because of that. WHAT? The age of a WMD makes a difference now? SO an old nuke will not be considered a real nuke if it is used?

Fact - Chemical weapons have been found and used in Iraq. There is no question on that.

So where is all the media covereage. Just one or two little stories is all. I understand that it would make some of the things we said about Iraq true before the war but that would not be good for the elections of course so you won't see it in the press. Well here it is folks in all its wonderful truth.

FOX NEWS
Monday, May 17, 2004

BAGHDAD, Iraq — A roadside bomb containing sarin nerve agent (search) recently exploded near a U.S. military convoy, the U.S. military said Monday.

Bush administration officials told Fox News that mustard gas (search) was also recently discovered.

Two people were treated for "minor exposure" after the sarin incident but no serious injuries were reported. Soldiers transporting the shell for inspection suffered symptoms consistent with low-level chemical exposure, which is what led to the discovery, a U.S. official told Fox News.

"The Iraqi Survey Group confirmed today that a 155-millimeter artillery round containing sarin nerve agent had been found," Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt (search), the chief military spokesman in Iraq, told reporters in Baghdad. "The round had been rigged as an IED (improvised explosive device) which was discovered by a U.S. force convoy."

The round detonated before it would be rendered inoperable, Kimmitt said, which caused a "very small dispersal of agent."

However, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said the results were from a field test, which can be imperfect, and said more analysis was needed. If confirmed, it would be the first finding of a banned weapon upon which the United States based its case for war.

Click to Read the Weapons of Mass Destruction Handbook

A senior Bush administration official told Fox News that the sarin gas shell is the second chemical weapon discovered recently.

Two weeks ago, U.S. military units discovered mustard gas that was used as part of an IED. Tests conducted by the Iraqi Survey Group (search) — a U.S. organization searching for weapons of mass destruction — and others concluded the mustard gas was "stored improperly," which made the gas "ineffective."

They believe the mustard gas shell may have been one of 550 projectiles for which former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein failed to account when he made his weapons declaration shortly before Operation Iraqi Freedom began last year. Iraq also failed to then account for 450 aerial bombs with mustard gas. That, combined with the shells, totaled about 80 tons of unaccounted for mustard gas.

It also appears some top Pentagon officials were surprised by the sarin news; they thought the matter was classified, administration officials told Fox News.

An official at the U.N. Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission (UNMOVIC) headquarters in New York said the commission is surprised to hear news of the mustard gas.

"If that's the case, why didn't they announce it earlier?" the official asked.

The UNMOVIC official said the group needs to know more from the Bush administration before it's possible to determine if this is "old or new stuff. It is known that Iraq used sarin during the Iraq-Iran war, however.

Kimmitt said the shell belonged to a class of ordnance that Saddam's government said was destroyed before the 1991 Gulf war (search). Experts believe both the sarin and mustard gas weapons date back to that time.

"It was a weapon that we believe was stocked from the ex-regime time and it had been thought to be an ordinary artillery shell set up to explode like an ordinary IED and basically from the detection of that and when it exploded, it indicated that it actually had some sarin in it," Kimmitt said.

The incident occurred "a couple of days ago," he added. The discovery reportedly occurred near Baghdad International Airport.

Washington officials say the significance of the find is that some chemical shells do still exist in Iraq, and it's thought that fighters there may be upping their attacks on U.S. forces by using such weapons.

The round was an old "binary-type" shell in which two chemicals held in separate sections are mixed after firing to produce sarin, Kimmitt said.

He said he believed that insurgents who rigged the artillery shell as a bomb didn't know it contained the nerve agent, and that the dispersal of the nerve agent from such a rigged device was very limited.

The shell had no markings. It appears the binary sarin agents didn't mix, which is why there weren't serious injuries from the initial explosion, a U.S. official told Fox News.

"Everybody knew Saddam had chemical weapons, the question was, where did they go. Unfortunately, everybody jumped on the offramp and said 'well, because we didn't find them, he didn't have them,'" said Fox News military analyst Lt. Gen. Tom McInerney.

"I doubt if it's the tip of the iceberg but it does confirm what we've known ... that he [Saddam] had weapons of mass destruction that he used on his own people," Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, told Fox News. "This does show that the fear we had is very real. Now whether there is much more of this we don't know, Iraq is the size of the state of California."

But there were more reasons than weapons to get rid of Saddam, he added. "We considered Saddam Hussein a threat not just because of weapons of mass destruction," Grassley said.

Iraqi Scientist: You Will Find More

Gazi George, a former Iraqi nuclear scientist under Saddam's regime, told Fox News he believes many similar weapons stockpiled by the former regime were either buried underground or transported to Syria. He noted that the airport where the device was detonated is on the way to Baghdad from the Syrian border.

George said the finding likely will be the first in a series of discoveries of such weapons.

"Saddam is the type who will not store those materials in a military warehouse. He's gonna store them either underground, or, as I said, lots of them have gone west to Syria and are being brought back with the insurgencies," George told Fox News. "It is difficult to look in areas that are not obvious to the military's eyes.

"I'm sure they're going to find more once time passes," he continued, saying one year is not enough for the survey group or the military to find the weapons.

Saddam, when he was in power, had declared that he did in fact possess mustard-gas filled artilleries but none that included sarin.

"I think what we found today, the sarin in some ways, although it's a nerve gas, it's a lucky situation sarin detonated in the way it did ... it's not as dangerous as the cocktails Saddam used to make, mixing blister" agents with other gases and substances, George said.

Officials: Discovery Is 'Significant'

U.S. officials told Fox News that the shell discovery is a "significant" event.

Artillery shells of the 155-mm size are as big as it gets when it comes to the ordnance lobbed by infantry-based artillery units. The 155 howitzer can launch high capacity shells over several miles; current models used by the United States can fire shells as far as 14 miles. One official told Fox News that a conventional 155-mm shell could hold as much as "two to five" liters of sarin, which is capable of killing thousands of people under the right conditions in highly populated areas.

The Iraqis were very capable of producing such shells in the 1980s but it's not as clear that they continued after the first Gulf War.

In 1995, Japan's Aum Shinrikyo (search) cult unleashed sarin gas in Tokyo's subways, killing 12 people and sickening thousands. In February of this year, Japanese courts convicted the cult's former leader, Shoko Asahara, and sentence him to be executed.

Developed in the mid-1930s by Nazi scientists, a single drop of sarin can cause quick, agonizing choking death. There are no known instances of the Nazis actually using the gas.

Nerve gases work by inhibiting key enzymes in the nervous system, blocking their transmission. Small exposures can be treated with antidotes, if administered quickly.

Antidotes to nerve gases similar to sarin are so effective that top poison gas researchers predict they eventually will cease to be a war threat.

Fox News' Wendell Goler, Steve Harrigan, Ian McCaleb, Liza Porteus, James Rosen and The Associated Press contributed to this report.

Well where is the public outcry.??? Guess its because the leftys want to keep it quite. Not good for them before elections huh??

Comments

kingbee

on Jun 09, 2004

there was--and continues to be--press and broadcast news coverage of these two incidents and it included just about everything youve mentioned.

so whats the point?

we spent all those millions of dollars and so many lives have been lost to discover 2 contaminated shells over the course of 15 months?

they were clearly NOT in the hands of anyone capable of utilizing them as they were intended. seems like a pretty sloppy plan to me.

ShadowWar

on Jun 09, 2004

Reply By: kingbeePosted: Wednesday, June 09, 2004there was--and continues to be--press and broadcast news coverage of these two incidents and it included just about everything youve mentioned. so whats the point? we spent all those millions of dollars and so many lives have been lost to discover 2 contaminated shells over the course of 15 months? they were clearly NOT in the hands of anyone capable of utilizing them as they were intended. seems like a pretty sloppy plan to me.

Ahhh I didn't say it wasn't covered. You must not have read my post. I said it has not been covered to the extent that one would think for the finding of chemical weapons, since that is much of the outcry about this whole war issue.

And any logically thinking person would know that if you have found two shells, there will be more. They may not have worked correctly, thank God, but now they know what they have, maybe next time we won't be so lucky. I guess you want to wait until they figure it out and gas a few hundred of our soldiers before we really make a push on this issue. That would make sense. My point is that most people have not even heard the two stories on this becuase they were downplayed and then not mentioned again after a few days.

Read my post and you will see thats the point I was making, the lefty press reports what it thinks will help its own agenda, not the news and especially not anything that misht show G. Bush was right about something.

ShadowWar

on Jun 09, 2004

Oh and BTW they were not contaminated shells, they were chemical weapon shells. Shells designed to carry and carrying chemical weapons.

kingbee

on Jun 09, 2004

i was using contaminated in a more general sense: to indicate they evidenced some actual payload or potential payload. no i do not want chemical weapons used against our troops. whether or not that happens is hardly dependent upon how much coverage these stories receive (unless it works to the opposite effect, and enquiring anti-coalition forces are monitoring the fox network thereby discovering what it is theyre sitting on--if that is truly the case).

it was a newsworthy discovery but. in light of the fact that hundreds of our troops are being killed and thousands injured with conventional weapons, not likely to be considered front page news a month later.

in the larger scope of things, as i thought i pointed out, it hardly justifies the death or incapacitation of a single american soldier.

ShadowWar

on Jun 09, 2004

it was a newsworthy discovery but. in light of the fact that hundreds of our troops are being killed and thousands injured with conventional weapons, not likely to be considered front page news a month later. in the larger scope of things, as i thought i pointed out, it hardly justifies the death or incapacitation of a single american soldier.

I never said anything about it justifying the death of anyone, including Iraqies. I said that the press is not fair or proper in its covereage of the Iraq War. It is designed to cause tension and misinformation and is very one sided, anti-Bush sided. Anything that may make something Bush said or did look good does not get reported or is buried as much as they can. Anything to make him look bad, is blown all out of proportion, i.e. the prisoner abuse scandal.

Also I have to say your "if that is truely the case" just goes to show that even in the face of the reports, some people are so abti-Bush, they still refuse to accept anything that might prove a point of his. Did we or did we not now find WMD's/Chemical weapons in Iraq? Just because at this point the rest of them are in enemy hands doesn't make the fact that there are more out there any less scary.

God help us..

Coocoo_bean

on Jun 09, 2004

I am convinced that if this discovery was a big deal that justified their going into Iraq in the first place, Bush would be publicising the hell out of this........... But because there's only two small articles...............

messybuu

on Jun 09, 2004

I could understand why people who were against the war solely because they couldn't find WMDs might still be against it now. After all, I often find WMDs lying around. They mysteriously pop up everywhere.

Berkman's Pretender

on Jun 13, 2004

I've always taken the term 'weapons of mass destruction' more literally than others. I would expect that the term may have been especially cointed to differentiate between nuclear-level threat and suicidal car bombers; the latter still takes people's lives and is to be abhorred, but cannot by definition cause extensive damage over a large scale area in a short timeframe: the sort of thing that China, Pakistan, North Korea and the United States have.
Redefining WMDs as the kind of thing they're turning up now in Iraq only places us in danger of legitimising preemptive strikes on the basis that a repressive state, with a harsh agenda, could pose a future threat if left unchecked. That is far too nebulous to take beyond the drawingboard stage. If Saddam possessed WMDs capable of being a threat to anyone you'd think imminent strikes by the 'coalition of the willing' would have been the time to use them.

I'll let you in on a secret: many of those rabid lefties you refer to are upset not because they're kneejerk Bush haters but because they see the rule of law being flouted, they see an attack on a citizen's right to dissent in the name of solidarity in pursuing the 'war on terror'.
I find it farcical that the right talks about leftie censorship when conservatives have a long history of shutting down opposing voices. Why was that New Mexico principal telling students who expressed anti-war sentiments to "Shut your faces!" if the right is so committed to hearing out a range of viewpoints? Why was EL Doctorow howled down for saying that some things Bush had stated emphatically now turned out not to be true? Couldn't be a case of trying to drown out anything not supportive of their own pro-Bush stance could it?

ShadowWar

on Jun 14, 2004

Here is a NEW article, posted today..

Saddam's WMD hidden in Syria, says Iraq survey chief
By Con Coughlin
(Filed: 25/01/2004)

David Kay, the former head of the coalition's hunt for Iraq's weapons of mass destruction, yesterday claimed that part of Saddam Hussein's secret weapons programme was hidden in Syria.

In an exclusive interview with The Telegraph, Dr Kay, who last week resigned as head of the Iraq Survey Group, said that he had uncovered evidence that unspecified materials had been moved to Syria shortly before last year's war to overthrow Saddam.

"We are not talking about a large stockpile of weapons," he said. "But we know from some of the interrogations of former Iraqi officials that a lot of material went to Syria before the war, including some components of Saddam's WMD programme. Precisely what went to Syria, and what has happened to it, is a major issue that needs to be resolved."

Dr Kay's comments will intensify pressure on President Bashar Assad to clarify the extent of his co-operation with Saddam's regime and details of Syria's WMD programme. Mr Assad has said that Syria was entitled to defend itself by acquiring its own biological and chemical weapons arsenal.

Syria was one of Iraq's main allies in the run-up to the war and hundreds of Iraqi officials - including members of Saddam's family - were given refuge in Damascus after the collapse of the Iraqi dictator's regime. Many of the foreign fighters responsible for conducting terrorist attacks against the coalition are believed to have entered Iraq through Syria.

A Syrian official last night said: "These allegations have been raised many times in the past by Israeli officials, which proves that they are false."

Hmmmmmmmm

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