500 WMDs found in Iraq. Just saw Rick Santorum’s press conference on TV. Links to follow when I find one.
If you find links first, format like this in the comments:
w3.nameofwebsite.com
(OK, The Corner seems to be watching TV anyway… Try refreshing.)
UPDATE: Allah Pundit says he’s not that impressed.
UPDATE 2: Bullet points.
UPDATE 3: Keep checking the “Allah Pundit” link above (actually goes to Malkin’s Hot Air) for lots of updates, plus video of the press conference. No surprise: Captain Ed is on the case.
LOL Wimpy and Kanadien Kyle… Good ones, I needed the laughs! Now lets get back to real news stories Canadian media and trolls know and love like the Liberal leadership convention…. sheeeesh!
WHO CARES?
Nothing new here. The ISG said in 2004:
“ISG assesses that Iraq and Coalition Forces will continue to discover small numbers of degraded chemical weapons, which the former Regime mislaid or improperly destroyed prior to 1991. ISG believes the bulk of these weapons were likely abandoned, forgotten and lost during the Iran-Iraq war because tens of thousands of CW munitions were forward deployed along frequently and rapidly shifting battlefronts…”
http://www.cia.gov/cia/reports/iraq_wmd_2004/addenda.pdf
Neutralsam sums up the entirety of the left when presented with information that doesn’t fit their agenda:
“WHO CARES?”
Clearly, not the left.
Not that it surprises me.
R:
“God you people are stupid. You’ll believe anything, won’t you?”
You must be referring to all of those lefties who’ve been watching too many Michael Moore movies and surfing for info on the Daily Kos.
If you’re talking about these rusty old WMD’s that were supposed to already be destroyed, maybe this story is true, maybe it isn’t. I’d like to know why your world view makes you so 100% sure that it’s us who are stupid for believing that Saddam could have WMD (after having used them and obstructing the UN at every turn) and not you for denying even the possibility. But of course since facts don’t matter to a lefty, anything that contradicts the Daily Kos is “stupid” cause you say so. If facts or an alternate possibility are presented, they must be lies cause you don’t want to hear you may be wrong. If someone says something you don’t like, they’re obviously doing something illegal cause you don’t want people sayings stuff you don’t like and what else is the definition of illegal? And of course if something happens to contradict what you don’t want you’d be “stupid” to believe it cause you’re right and the facts are wrong. Bloody hell how do you lefties learn anything at all?
Thanks, BruceR – It looks like you’ve hit the nail right on the head. Folks, if we go “gaga” over every tidbit that turns up that looks like it might support our position, it doesn’t lend our position much creedence, especially when it turns out that the item was barely noteworthy, much less newsworthy.
The sissy lefties love to crow “It’s all about OIL”. Could any of you Michael Moore worshipping pussies please tell me where I can gas up my SUV with “Saddam 92 Octane Hi-Test”? Will the gas bar at Safeway be bringing it in soon? I’ve been waiting quite some time now. After all, the tanker ships must have been departing Iraq for several years now, huh? All that free oil must have necessitated an extra shift at the refineries in New Orleans….huh?…what’s that? Oh right – Bush/Rove/Cheney created the hurricane that wiped out the refineries in Louisiana.
Hmmm..must dig deeper….Bush Lied! Yeah, that’s it.
Cowards like steved and mclelland would rather bend, lube and spread for radical islam and somehow claim ‘moral superiority’, ‘nuance’ and the need for ‘dialogue’ with the enemy than to blow these #uckers even further back into the stone age.
So it’s safe to assume that you’ve had your missus/’life partner’/drag queen/mate fitted for a new burka and you’ve signed up for conversational arabic at the local community college? Burn any Israel flags lately? Donated and awaiting charitable receipt to the Kadr family defense fund? Search on Google for Cindy Sheehan/Shrillary Clinton photos for those quiet times when you’re home alone?
Bunch of gutless navel-gazing girlie men.
NBC, MSNBC and FOX news all debunk the story, noting pentagon officials who said “the munitions are are the same kind of ordnance the U.S. military has been gathering up in Iraq for the past several years, and ‘not the WMD we were looking for when we went in this time.'”
I think it was Debris Trail who pointed out to me that the problem with the MSM was its tendency to jump all over a story, then when it’s debunked to not make a similar effort to be sure that everyone knows its debunked.
Of course, recently on SDA we have seen the Iran is going to make Jews wear badges story, and now this. Does SDA have an obligation, as we think the MSM does, to give everyone an update in a place of equal prominence as the original annoucement?
I’m not here to get into whether Saddam was a threat, the war jusified, or Iran a bad place. Those issues are all dependent upon whether or not we can first agree on standards of argumentation like “are these 500 degraded shells the reason Saddam needed to be stopped?” The answer, from the pentagon no less, is no.
Regards,
That was for the liberal convention.
But I noticed you’ll fall for anything.
I bet you still believe that Bush is sane too.
Still grasping at straws I see.
But the Iraqis will be calling for the withdrawal and if the US doesn’t then the world will see. Some of the willing might say the hell with the aid the US sends their countries so they’ll stay.
The first three years of vietnam only 1800 died.
Since China and Russia are now backing Iran that’ll give North Korea the balls to fire their missile.
Watch as the cost of liviing will really start rising this year. You haven’t seen hurtin yet. Wait till your paying over half your wages to Income Taxes. Gotta keep making them bombs and bullets.
I knew it! I knew it! I knew it!
Believing that Saddam Hussein DIDN’T have WMD was a bigger stretch than knowing he did–but where?
Robert McClelland said: “I’ve lost count. Is this the 10th or 11th time the WMD wolf has been cried since the invasion?
“Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me. Fool me ten times and I must be a conservative.”
Well, Mr. McClelland, you were fooled on Stephen Taylor’s blog last week, when you called him a liar because he said that the CBC didn’t air any CPC leadership debates. You insisted that CPC leadership hopefuls’ debates were shown on Politics. You were demanding a mea culpa from him.
You were proven wrong, in well-documented posts by stephen taylor and eastern capitalist, so where is your apology to stephen taylor?
Lie once, shame on you. Lie twice, you should say you’re sorry. Lie ten times and you must be a liberal.
When it comes to WMD. I really don’t care. I think Bush made a mistake empathizing this aspect of the war at the time. I have no doubt they existed. Just the degree of how many where stocked.
I remember if few others do it seems. That during the first Gulf war. Saddam gave up 400 air craft fighters to Iran, for “safe keeping”. As well as many tanks & other equipment.
Think about this for a while. Saddam had just finished a war with Iran for seven to eight years. It was so bitter the Iranians used there own children as mine sweepers. Gas was used on villages. The death toll was horrendous.
After all this , after the coalition forces won. Iran gave them back to Saddam with his other war material. Think deep & hard on this fact folks.
It’s entirely possible that bin Laden is hiding out in Iran and/or Syria as opposed to Pakistan/Afghani border area.
Iran/Iraq once hard enemies could conceivably now cooperate against allies. Iranian president’s letter certainly opens several areas for dialogue between East and West in interest of shutting down any nuclear exchange.
ALL WORLD LEADERS ADVISED TO SIT AT U.N. SECURITY COUNCIL TO DISCUSS ISSUES FACE TO FACE WITH IRANIAN PRESIDENT CONTENT OF LETTER. EVENT TO BE BROADCAST WORLDWIDE. ARAB COUNTRIES TO CONFIRM ISRAEL’s ‘RIGHT TO EXIST’ IN SIGNED TREATY.
ANY NUCLEAR EXCHANGE ON ANY SOVEREIGN SOIL is a lose-lose situation globally and for all sovereign states.
Canada’s foreign affairs department could lead this initiative as former peace-keeper respected on world stage.
Warwick
The point is that Bush, Cheney, Rice, Powell, Rumsfeld and other Bush mouthpieces insisted that America was in IMMANENT danger. This was an emergency. Bush couldn’t wait for inspection.
They said the ‘bomb’ was almost ready.
They said they knew where these WMD were.
So 70% of Americans believed them and the war was on. Suddenly, nothing is where they thought it was. Not only that it was nowhere to be found.
If Saddam was ready to use it how could it so suddenly be invisible. If Saddam had it ready to go. Why can’t anyone find it? You can’t have rockets on the launchpad or stockpiles of shells with WMD in them set and ready to deliver one day and invisible the next. If there was any credibility left it expired when Bush’s own inspector came back and said there are none.
So these degraded stocks they found in 2003 were clearly not in any shape to use. That is why Bush didn’t trot out the report and wave it around and say he is vindicated.
Warwick –
Since you asked, my “world view” is basically to believe things are true because the preponderance of credible evidence suggests that it is true. I never believed Saddam had WMDs because those who were in a position to know would not confirm it. UN inspectors on the ground prior to 1998 knew there were no viable weapons left. Blix’s inspectors in 2002-2003 also could not confirm the presence of any such weapons, although they did find that Iraq’s El Samud missles had an effective range of 15km more than they were allowed, and so those missles were destroyed. By the way, both these inspection efforts were cut short by armed agression ordered by American presidents.
I also know that the US oversold the threat about what remnants of Saddam’s 1991 arsenal the UN had not been able to account for. For example, the small amount of Anthrax that Saddam couldn’t account for ceased to be viable after about 1993 (weaponized Anthrax has a shelf life). The estimates on Saddam’s stockpiles of chlorine gas was based on Iraq’s total countrywide use of chlorine, which was assumed to be 100% eamarked for the production of chemical weapons, when in fact the chlorine was being used for water purification, just like it is here in Saskatchewan. By the logic of the Bush administration, Don Atchison should be removed from office by military attack because Saskatoon has stockpiles of chlorine.
A huge stockpile of chemicals was discovered near Basra early in the 03 war to much fanfare on Fox News. They turned out to be agricultural chemicals. Colin Powell’s “mobile chemical weapons labs” were actually mobile hydrogen generators for gassing up weather balloons. The deserts in Iraq have a lot of dud artillary shells that sometimes turn up as IEDs and one of these once contained traces of chemical weapons agents — all these false alarms were touted by the wingnuts to be the “smoking gun”, and all were quickly debunked by empirical evidence.
The US Defense Department itself has declared the recent announcement as non-news and in no way indicative of the “smoking gun” that the war mongers are so fervently hoping to find. Bush’s own handpicked inspectors sent in after the war declared that there was never an immanet threat by Iraq WMDs. Didn’t you notice that the earth-shaking announcement didn’t come from Bush or Rumsfeld or Rasputin — I mean, Cheney? If this were really the “smoking gun” wouldn’t these guys be jumping up and down saying “See! See! We were right!”
Now consider the source of the latest “revelations” of Iraqi WMDs: Senator Rick Sanitorium (R Pennsylvania) is a radical right wingnut who is in serious jeopardy in losing his seat because he is a corrupt wacko (his wife once miscarried and the two of them brought the fetus home for their other kids to play with). He rose to “prominence” during the Terri Schaivo debacle, which was the beginning of the Republican’s precipitous decline in the polls. Now, as then, he is using a right wing fairy tale to get his name in the papers and cynically activate gullible right wing magical thinkers, because those are the only sentient beings who will cast a vote for him at this point.
These, my friend, are what we call facts. They are what guide a rational worldview, not wishes or conjecture. That is also why you people are stupid, because you’ll believe anything.
More re story above: Saddam on hunger strike.
Does Saddam have a sewer?
Review by well-known food critic: Baghdad Bob.
The chef is good. The menu superb. The ambience is intimate, clean, cozy. One caveat: Goat was old. Rating overall: Superb Five Stars ***** …-
Saddam ends hunger strike after missing one meal
Posted by RWR8189
On 06/23/2006 3:35:55 AM PDT · 15 replies · 163+ views
Reuters ^ | June 23, 2006
BAGHDAD (Reuters) – Saddam Hussein ended a brief hunger strike after missing just one meal in his U.S.-run prison, a U.S. military spokesman said on Friday. The former Iraqi leader had refused lunch on Thursday in protest at the killing of one of his lawyers by gunmen, but the spokesman said he ate his evening meal. Former Saddam aides being held in the same prison had refused to eat three meals since Wednesday evening but ended their fast with the ex-president. “They all took their dinner meal,” the spokesman told Reuters. Saddam is on trial for crimes against humanity for…
freerepublic focus/f-news/1654201/posts
R about Rick Santorum, a “corrupt whacko,” because “his his wife once miscarried and the two of them brought the fetus home for their other kids to play with.”
I highly doubt that Rick Santorum brought the fetus home for his “kids to play with.” Many couples today, when they miscarry a child, do take the fetus from the hospital and have a burial ceremony for their baby, in a church or a funeral home. They name the baby and commit him/her to God’s care. By ritualizing their painful loss and by involving other family members, they are able to better move forward within the context of family and community support for the little life, and the dreams they had for this child, that they have lost.
Nothing whacko about that.
See above reference to Ramsay Clark. Mad Fiddler spells: “Ramsey”. Ramsay? Ramsey? What’s in a name, Saddam? …-
The Mad Fiddler said…
Reuters is reporting (6/22/2006 12:47:31 am) that gunmen in police uniforms murdered a third lawyer from Saddam Hussein’s defense team. The question naturally arises “Who benefits from this sort of intimidation and liquidation of his defenders?”
Some answers leap to mind: (1) former Ba’athist supporters of Saddam, hoping to spring him somehow, (2) groups who want Saddam dead and buried, and (3) Iran, who want Iraq stirred up and chaotic.
To me, the inability of Saddam’s defense team to maintain their own personal security is as much an index of the general state of things as any of the other miserable deaths.
And I have to ask, if they get Ramsey, do we forgive them all the other misdeeds?
belmont club
Sh*t… was that Sad’s last meal? …
Wretchard at Belmont Club said:
Personally I think Saddam has just heard the trapdoor grate under him on the gallows. In Iran there will probably be lights burning in the all the ministries.
The only capitals some leftard can type are reserved for his-ownself.
The left brings nothing, but a promise of more lies, death and suffering.
R:
Well, R, you sure are well informed! Wow. You knew that Iraq had no WMD’s. How convenient! All the same you don’t mind if I call bullshit on you do you?
The UN inspectors did not say they “knew” there were no WMD’s. They said they didn’t find any but also said that Saddam wasn’t cooperating and was deliberately misleading the inspectors. That is an entirely different thing than and absence. We do know that Saddam had lots of WMD’s he didn’t account for. What happened to them the inspectors never found out. They couldn’t confirm anything. They can’t say that they were destroyed, can’t say they weren’t destroyed. Seems like YOU are the only one who has any certainty. That makes YOU the one stupid enough to believe anything.
Blix may not have found evidence of WMD’s but it is a logical fallacy to say that absence of proof is proof of absence. There have been plenty of accounts of WMD’s being moved to Syria. Could those Iraqis have lied about there accounts? Certainly. But given the Oil-for-Food scandal and Blix’s known anti-war stance, it’s equally probable he was lying. Certainly Annan, Chirac and all the other corrupt leaders were. You state that Iraq had no WMD. Not probably didn’t. You say definitively they didn’t. You can’t possibly know that. If you think you know that you are a fool.
So, here is Blix in his own words:
“The recent inspection find in the private home of a scientist of a box of some 3,000 pages of documents, much of it relating to the laser enrichment of uranium support a concern that has long existed that documents might be distributed to the homes of private individuals. …we cannot help but think that the case might not be isolated and that such placements of documents is deliberate to make discovery difficult and to seek to shield documents by placing them in private homes.”
“I have mentioned the issue of anthrax to the Council on previous occasions and I come back to it as it is an important one.
Iraq has declared that it produced about 8,500 litres of this biological warfare agent, which it states it unilaterally destroyed in the summer of 1991. Iraq has provided little evidence for this production and no convincing evidence for its destruction.
There are strong indications that Iraq produced more anthrax than it declared, and that at least some of this was retained after the declared destruction date. It might still exist. Either it should be found and be destroyed under UNMOVIC supervision or else convincing evidence should be produced to show that it was, indeed, destroyed in 1991.”
Dr. Hans Blix, Chief UN Weapons Inspector
Addressing the UN Security Council
January 27, 2003
Your account then is just plain crap. Total fabrication. Your story is false. Oh, how stupid you must be to believe your idiocy, eh?
How about this then?
CNN: How did Hussein intend to use the weapon, once it was completed?
HAMZA: Saddam has a whole range of weapons of mass destruction, nuclear, biological and chemical. According to German intelligence estimates, we expect him to have three nuclear weapons by 2005. So, the window will close by 2005, and we expect him then to be a lot more aggressive with his neighbours and encouraging terrorism, and using biological weapons. Now he’s using them through surrogates like al Qaeda, but we expect he’ll use them more aggressively then.
Dr. Khidhir Hamza, former Iraqi Nuclear Scientist for 20 years
Interviewed on CNN
October 22, 2001
Was he lying? Maybe. There is certainly no evidence. Of course, there is no evidence against either. Funny thing about stuff you hide, people have a hard time finding it!
Ok, how about the other leaders then? How sure were that there were no WMD’s and/or Saddam was no threat?
Paul Martin:
“The fact is that there is now, we know well, a proliferation of nuclear weapons, and that many weapons that Saddam Huseein had, we don’t know where they are…. [T]errorists have access to all of them,” the Canadian premier warned.
Canadian Prime Minister Jean Chretien, 17 December: “Saddam Hussein has brought this crisis on himself.”
German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder, 17 December: “[The attacks are] the consequence of the obstinate refusal of Saddam Hussein to cooperate with UN weapons inspectors.”
Japanese Prime Minister Keizo Obuchi, 17 December: “It is deeply regrettable that Iraq failed to cooperate with UNSCOM, which has brought the situation to this pass.”
Denmark:
“The international community has demanded for 12 years that Saddam Hussein give up his weapons of mass destruction, but Saddam Hussein has not co-operated.
“It is unacceptable to make a mockery of the international community’s authority.”
[Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen]
“We have known for many years that Saddam Hussein is seeking and developing weapons of mass destruction.”
Sen. Ted Kennedy (D, MA), Sept. 27, 2002.
“I will be voting to give the President of the United States the authority to use force — if necessary — to disarm Saddam Hussein because I believe that a deadly arsenal of weapons of mass destruction in his hands is a real and grave threat to our security.”
Sen. John F. Kerry (D, MA), Oct. 9, 2002.
Portuguese Prime Minister Jose Manuel Durao Barroso, October 2003: “When [former President Bill] Clinton was here recently he told me was absolutely convinced, given his years in the White House and the access to privileged information which he had, that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction until the end of the Saddam regime.”
French President Jacques Chirac, February 2003: “There is a problem – the probable possession of weapons of mass destruction by an uncontrollable country, Iraq. The international community is right … in having decided Iraq should be disarmed.”
Vermont Gov. Howard Dean, September 2002: “There’s no question that Saddam Hussein is a threat to the United States and to our allies.” Dean, February 2003: “I agree with President Bush – he has said that Saddam Hussein is evil. And he is. [Hussein] is a vicious dictator and a documented deceiver. He has invaded his neighbours, used chemical arms, and failed to account for all the chemical and biological weapons he had before the Gulf War. He has murdered dissidents and refused to comply with his obligations under U.N. Security Council Resolutions. And he has tried to build a nuclear bomb. Anyone who believes in the importance of limiting the spread of weapons of mass killing, the value of democracy and the centrality of human rights must agree that Saddam Hussein is a menace. The world would be a better place if he were in a different place other than the seat of power in Baghdad or any other country.” Dean, March 2003: “[Iraq] is automatically an imminent threat to the countries that surround it because of the possession of these weapons.”
Rep. Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., December 1998: “Saddam Hussein has been engaged in the development of weapons of mass destruction technology, which is a threat to countries in the region, and he has made a mockery of the weapons inspection process.”
Sen. John Rockefeller, D-W.Va., ranking minority Intelligence Committee member, October 2002: “There is unmistakable evidence that Saddam Hussein is working aggressively to develop nuclear weapons and will likely have nuclear weapons within the next five years.”
Oh, and for the record, Zyclon B is the chemical used to murder the Jews in WWII. It was designed to be used as an agricultural pesticide. Do you know the concept of hiding WMD’s under “Dual Use” technologies? That doesn’t mean that every commercial chemical is poison gas but just because a chemical has a commercial use doesn’t make it benign either. It’s very easy to make Cyanide gas from ordinary chemicals…
In other words, you provide the typical lefty versions of “facts.” Opinions you believe in so assume MUST be 100% true. Fool.
Blix, ElBaradei: U.S. ignored evidence against WMDs
WASHINGTON (CNN) — The United Nations’ top two weapons experts said Sunday that the invasion of Iraq a year ago was not justified by the evidence in hand at the time.
“I think it’s clear that in March, when the invasion took place, the evidence that had been brought forward was rapidly falling apart,” Hans Blix, who oversaw the agency’s investigation into whether Iraq had chemical and biological weapons, said on CNN’s “Late Edition with Wolf Blitzer.”
Blix described the evidence Secretary of State Colin Powell presented to the U.N. Security Council in February 2003 as “shaky,” and said he related his opinion to U.S. officials, including national security adviser Condoleezza Rice.
“I think they chose to ignore us,” Blix said.
Mohamed ElBaradei, director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, spoke to CNN from IAEA headquarters in Vienna, Austria.
ElBaradei said he had been “pretty convinced” that Iraq had not resumed its nuclear weapons program, which the IAEA dismantled in 1997.
Seems like both US weapons weapons inspectors at the time didn’t agree with the White House.
Hans Blix conducted 731 inspections between November 2002 and March 2003.
Both Blix and ElBaradei have contradicted themselves so many times as to sound like JFKerry. There credibility is zero.
Cite, please, Warwick. If you can.
To understand the approach of the IAEA’s inspection over the past two months, it is important first to recall what was accomplished during our inspections from 1991 to 1998, in fulfilment of our Security Council mandate to eliminate Iraq’s nuclear weapons programme. In September 1991, the IAEA seized documents in Iraq that demonstrated the extent of its nuclear weapons programme. By the end of 1992, we had largely destroyed, removed or rendered harmless all Iraqi facilities and equipment relevant to nuclear weapons production. We confiscated Iraq’s nuclear-weapons-usable material — high enriched uranium and plutonium — and by early 1994 we had removed it from the country. By December 1998 — when the inspections were brought to a halt with a military strike imminent — we were confident that we had not missed any significant component of Iraq’s nuclear programme.
While we did not claim absolute certainty, our conclusion at that time was that we had neutralized Iraq’s nuclear weapons programme and that there were no indications that Iraq retained any physical capability to produce weapon usable nuclear material.
During the intervening four years of our absence from Iraq, we continued our analytical work to the best of our ability, using satellite imagery and other information.
So after taking all Iraq had they kept watch on Iraqis through satilites to make sure they didn’t rebuild.
Thanks, Warwick, for your post of 12:11 p.m. today. Most informative and sensible.
SIERRA CLUB KISS MY AXE
This is a congratulatory advisory to inform you that this post has been nominated for the prestigious “Con of the Week” Award”. Well done!
http://www.stageleft.info/2006/06/25/conucopia-vi-the-horror-the-horror/