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So what is the Rub?

http://www.breitbart.com/news/2006/0....07o4imol.html

Quote:

US-led coalition forces in Iraq have found some 500 chemical weapons since the March 2003 invasion, Republican lawmakers said, citing an intelligence report.

"Since 2003, Coalition forces have recovered approximately 500 weapons munitions which contain degraded mustard or sarin nerve agent," said an overview of the report unveiled by Senator Rick Santorum and Peter Hoekstra, head of the intelligence committee of the House of Representatives.

"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," it says.

The lawmakers cited the report as validation of the US rationale for the war, and stressed the ongoing danger they pose.

"This is an incredibly -- in my mind -- significant finding. The idea that, as my colleagues have repeatedly said in this debate on the other side of the aisle, that there are no weapons of mass destruction, is in fact false," Santorum said.

A Pentagon official who confirmed the findings said that all the weapons were pre-1991 vintage munitions "in such a degraded state they couldn't be used for what they are designed for."

The official, who asked not to be identified, said most were 155 millimeter artillery projectiles with mustard gas or sarin of varying degrees of potency.

"We're destroying them where we find them in the normal manner," the official said.

In 2004, the US army said it had found a shell containing sarin gas and another shell containing mustard gas, and a Pentagon official said at the time the discovery showed there were likely more.

The intelligence overview published Wednesday stressed that the 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," it said.

Santorum said the two-month-old report was prepared by the National Ground Intelligence Center, a military intelligence agency that started looking for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq when the Iraq Survey Group stopped doing so in late 2004.

Last year the head of Iraq Survey Group, Charles Duelfer, said that insurgents in Iraq had already used old chemical weapons in their attacks.

Nevertheless, "the impression that the Iraqi Survey Group left with the American people was they didn't find anything," Hoekstra said.

"But this says: Weapons have been discovered; more weapons exist. And they state that Iraq was not a WMD-free zone, that there are continuing threats from the materials that are or may still be in Iraq," he said.

Asked just how dangerous the weapons are, Hoekstra said: "One or two of these shells, the materials inside of these, transferred outside of the country, can be very, very deadly."

The report said that the purity of the chemical agents -- and thus their potency -- 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 said.

Reporters questioned the lawmakers as to why the Bush administration had not played up the report to boost their case for continued warfare in Iraq.

"The administration has been very clear that they want to look forward," Santorum said. "They felt it was not their role to go back and fight previous discussions."

Fear that Saddam Hussein might use his alleged arsenal of chemical and biological weapons was a reason US officials gave for launching the March 2003 invasion of Iraq.

So what is the rub. I take it there are not now, nor where there weapons of mass destruction right? There were posts and articles about this before. At first no "smoking gun", but weapons programs and precursors discovered. THen there were a few outdated munitions shells found, but no "smoking gun". So now they find AT LEAST 500 shells containing "WMDs". Was this merely a hickup on Saddams part? Is it that easy to forget then many weapons? Maybe disclose them at some point during the 12+ years of sanctions? Whispers say there is more to find beyond these "mere" 500 munition shells. Hey Saddam said he had no weapons in 98" right... Desert Fox, didn't we prove that wrong by finding thousands of gallons of chemicals?

Quote:

Originally Posted by Mojo_PeiPei

http://www.breitbart.com/news/2006/0....07o4imol.html

So what is the rub. I take it there are not now, nor where there weapons of mass destruction right? There were posts and articles about this before. At first no "smoking gun", but weapons programs and precursors discovered. THen there were a few outdated munitions shells found, but no "smoking gun". So now they find AT LEAST 500 shells containing "WMDs". Was this merely a hickup on Saddams part? Is it that easy to forget then many weapons? Maybe disclose them at some point during the 12+ years of sanctions? Whispers say there is more to find beyond these "mere" 500 munition shells. Hey Saddam said he had no weapons in 98" right... Desert Fox, didn't we prove that wrong by finding thousands of gallons of chemicals?

I'm surprised to see this Santorum/Hoekstra propaganda emerge here now as the anchor article for a new thread. I thought that the following comments from all three former lead U.S. Iraqi WMD inspectors; that I posted on the
"Interesting experence with a soldier" thread, a week ago, would have cleared up any confusion, Mojo. I see that it hasn't, so here it is again:

Quote:

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/s...toryId=5504298
Iraq
Expert: Iraq WMD Find Did Not Point to Ongoing Program
Listen to this story...

Talk of the Nation, June 22, 2006 · Two Republican lawmakers say a declassified report points to hundreds of weapons of mass destruction that were found in Iraq. Peter Hoekstra, who chairs the House Intelligence Committee, and Sen. Rick Santorum (R-PA) on Wednesday released a declassified summary of a report by the National Ground Intelligence Center. A former weapons inspector says most of the degraded weapons are 20 years old and did not point to an ongoing chemical weapons program.

Guest:

Charles Deulfer, Former chief U.S. weapons inspector in Iraq; former deputy chairman of the United Nations Weapons

Inspection Team in Iraq:

NEAL CONAN (host): The report says hundreds of WMDs were found in Iraq. Does this change any of the findings in your report?

DEULFER: No, the report -- the findings of the report were basically to describe the relationship of the regime with weapons of mass destruction generally. You know, at two different times, Saddam elected to have and then not to have weapons of mass destruction. We found, when we were investigating, some residual chemical munitions. And we said in the report that such chemical munitions would probably still be found. But the ones which have been found are left over from the Iran-Iraq war. They are almost 20 years old, and they are in a decayed fashion. It is very interesting that there are so many that were unaccounted for, but they do not constitute a weapon of mass destruction, although they could be a local hazard.

CONAN: Mm-hmm. So these -- were these the weapons of mass destruction that the Bush administration said that it was going into Iraq to find before the war?

DEULFER: No, these do not indicate an ongoing weapons of mass destruction program as had been thought to exist before the war. These are leftover rounds, which Iraq probably did not even know that it had. Certainly, the leadership was unaware of their existence, because they made very clear that they had gotten rid of their programs as a prelude to getting out of sanctions.

[...]

DEULFER: Sarin agent decays, you know, at a certain rate, as does mustard agent. What we found, both as U.N. and later when I was with the Iraq Survey Group, is that some of these rounds would have highly degraded agent, but it is still dangerous. You know, it can be a local hazard. If an insurgent got it and wanted to create a local hazard, it could be exploded. When I was running the ISG -- the Iraq Survey Group -- we had a couple of them that had been turned in to these IEDs, the improvised explosive devices. But they are local hazards. They are not a major, you know, weapon of mass destruction.

Quote:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...062201475.html
New Intel Report Reignites Iraq Arms Fight

By KATHERINE SHRADER
The Associated Press
Thursday, June 22, 2006; 11:11 PM

...."We now have found stockpiles," Santorum asserted.

But intelligence officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the subject's sensitive nature, said the weapons were produced before the 1991 Gulf War and there is no evidence to date of chemical munitions manufactured since then. They said an assessment of the weapons concluded they are so degraded that they couldn't now be used as designed.

They probably would have been intended for chemical attacks during the Iran-Iraq War, said David Kay, who headed the U.S. weapons-hunting team in Iraq from 2003 until early 2004.

He said experts on Iraq's chemical weapons are in "almost 100 percent agreement" that sarin nerve agent produced from the 1980s would no longer be dangerous.

"It is less toxic than most things that Americans have under their kitchen sink at this point," Kay said.And any of Iraq's 1980s-era mustard would produce burns, but it is unlikely to be lethal, Kay said.....

Quote:

http://www.time.com/time/nation/arti...351165,00.html
Posted Saturday, Sep. 14, 2002
Exclusive: Scott Ritter in His Own Words
The former weapons inspector explains his switch from getting up Saddam's nose to picking fights with Bush

....In 1998, you said Saddam had "not nearly disarmed." Now you say he doesn't have weapons of mass destruction

(WMD). Why did you change your mind?

I have never given Iraq a clean bill of health! Never! Never! I've said that no one has backed up any allegations that Iraq has reconstituted WMD capability with anything that remotely resembles substantive fact. To say that Saddam's doing it is in total disregard to the fact that if he gets caught he's a dead man and he knows it.

Deterrence has been adequate in the absence of inspectors but this is not a situation that can succeed in the long term. In the long term you have to get inspectors back in.

Iraq's borders are porous. Why couldn't Saddam have obtained the capacity to produce WMD since 1998 when the weapons inspectors left?

I am more aware than any UN official that Iraq has set up covert procurement funds to violate sanctions. This was true in 1997-1998, and I'm sure its true today. Of course Iraq can do this. The question is, has someone found that what Iraq has done goes beyond simple sanctions violations? We have tremendous capabilities to detect any effort by Iraq to obtain prohibited capability. The fact that no one has shown that he has acquired that capability doesn't necessarily translate into incompetence on the part of the intelligence community. It may mean that he hasn't done anything.....

Ritter's comments are from 2002.....but they are consistant with comments made by Charles Deulfer and David Kay, who both were responding directly to the assertions made by Rep. Hoekstra (R), and Sen. Santorum (R).

Why Mojo, if there was any PR "mileage" to be attempted to gain, in the hope of restoring their credibility on the issue of WMD actually existing in Iraq, are not Bush and Cheney the ones embracing this "story" as vidication for their ridiculous pre-invasion pronouncements of the threat that Saddam's Iraq posed to the rest of the world? This thread should be in the "paranoia" forum, Mojo.

These things have been old news for at least a year. They aren't really news in the context of wmd's as justification for invasion. It's more just rick santorum trying to get attention for something other than frothy mixes of lube and shit.

From the article:

Quote:

A Pentagon official who confirmed the findings said that all the weapons were pre-1991 vintage munitions "in such a degraded state they couldn't be used for what they are designed for."

They certainly aren't the wmds the admin spoke of as justification for going to war. At least i didn't hear the speech where the pres cited expired and functionally useless munitions. Probably because there was no such speech because the president, even with his aww-shucks downhominess, couldn't make expired weapons seem like much of a threat. What the admin did often cite were ongoing programs designed to produce new and presumably usable wmds. A bunch of ex-wmds were not what they were talking about by any stretch.

If these were actually the wmd's that were so important as a justification for invading iraq, don't you think the admin would have mentioned them in the 2-3 years since the weapons were found? Or do you think they'd save the news with the aim of using it to boost the reelection prospects of two struggling-in-the-polls republican senators?

Quote:

Originally Posted by Mojo_PeiPei

Hey Saddam said he had no weapons in 98" right... Desert Fox, didn't we prove that wrong by finding thousands of gallons of chemicals?

i have more dangerous chemicals under my kitchen sink.

I dont know what Iraq does with degraded, and worthless chemical warfare agents, but here in the US.....we usually Bury them.

Oh...Wait.