WEAPONS OF MASS DESTRUCTION Found in Iraq

[B-Man]

For the anti-war crowd who kept asking when we were going to find weapons of mass destruction, you have your answer: May 17, 2004. More coming soon...

Sarin, Mustard Gas Discovered Separately in Iraq
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."

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) 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 for which former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein failed to account when he made his weapons declaration shortly before Operation Iraqi Freedom began last year.

Investigators are trying to determine how insurgents obtained these weapons — whether they were looted or supplied.

It also appears some top Pentagon officials were taken by surprise by Kimmitt's announcement of the sarin discovery; they thought the matter was classified, administration officials told Fox News.

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

"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.

It was the first announcement of the discovery of such a weapon on which Washington made its case for war. 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 Iraqi Survey Group is a U.S. organization whose task was to search for weapons of mass destruction after the ouster of Saddam Hussein in last year's invasion.

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 former regime had declared all such rounds destroyed before the 1991 Gulf War," Kimmitt said. "Two explosive ordinance team members were treated for minor exposure to nerve agent as a result of the partial detonation of the round."

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.

Not everyone found the deadly artillery surprising.

"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 Hussein] had weapons of mad 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 than weapons to the need to depose 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 that 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 just 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 about 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, so officials are reluctant to guess the age of the shell or the capacity of the Iraqis prior to Operation Iraqi Freedom to produce such shells.

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.

[andyfox]

At least so far?

"It also appears some top Pentagon officials were taken by surprise by Kimmitt's announcement of the sarin discovery; they thought the matter was classified, administration officials told Fox News."

Interesting.

[Clarkmeister]

I am embarassed if we hang our hat on a single old buried roadside bomb that had probabaly been there for years.

[B-Man]

I'd lay pretty good odds that there will be more to come.

[elwoodblues]

Does anyone with more knowledge than myself (not too terribly high a standard) know if mustard gas is/should be considered a wmd? I know it is a chemical weapon, but are all chemical weapons wmds? I thought wmds were a subset of several different types of weapons classes - e.g. nuclear, biological, nucular (couldn't resist), and chemical.

Either way, if true, this is good news (in that we found some) and bad news (in that they were used).

[CORed]

Wow! We've found two artillery shells containing chemical weapons. If we hadn't inavaded, an Iraqi howitzer could have lobbed one of those suckers into New York City (if that howitzer was in Hoboken). That was certainly reason to go to war.

[superleeds]

Andy, I hope your not suggesting this story has been officially leaked, because if it has I think it shows nothing but contempt for the General Public, (or blind Panic in the Bush Admin.)

[adios]

[ QUOTE ]
Does anyone with more knowledge than myself (not too terribly high a standard) know if mustard gas is/should be considered a wmd?

[/ QUOTE ]

Is? Probably for the most part, at least by the White House /images/graemlins/smile.gif. Should be? My understanding is that mustard gas dissipates fairly quickly in an open air environment. But mustard gas may be very lethal in enclosed structures so perhaps it should be.

[elwoodblues]

That's my understanding as well. I think the dissipation factor discounts the "mass" element significantly.

[Mason Malmuth]

Hi Elwood:

It certainly should be. It was used to great effect by the Germans on the Russian Front in World War I.

Best wishes,
Mason

[Sloats]

Fine amounts in explosive shells could kill numerous individuals, although not immediately. It also imbedded itself in the soil and was still active for weeks afterwards.

[Boris]

"More to come" is a pretty low standard. I'm sure you wouldn't make any significant bets with your own money. The number one reason being that Saddam never used these "WMD" when he was getting his butt kicked by the US armed forces. To me that is the most convincing proof that Iraq did not have WMD.

[David Steele]

From your article:

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.

and from a different article:

Two former weapons inspectors — Hans Blix and David Kay — said the shell was likely a stray weapon that had been scavenged by militants and did not signify that Iraq had large stockpiles of such weapons.

I don't think this story qualifies for the massive coverage on CNN it is getting.

D.

[BeerMoney]

This is pathetic.

[B-Man]

That's a reasonable point, but you also have to consider he may have been unable to use them (because they were buried in the desert, or moved to Syria just before the war). Maybe he didn't foresee the war going as badly (for him) as it did, especially as quickly as it did.

I don't want to get into another big debate about whether he did or didn't; the anti-war crowd wanted proof of WMD, and we finally have some. I think it is more likely than not that we find more WMDs in the future.

[superleeds]

[ QUOTE ]
I don't want to get into another big debate about whether he did or didn't; the anti-war crowd wanted proof of WMD, and we finally have some.

[/ QUOTE ]

I can't speak for anyone else but for me this proves very little, and it certainly doesn't prove the war was justified on the WMD claims made by Bush and friends.

[B-Man]

[ QUOTE ]
and it certainly doesn't prove the war was justified

[/ QUOTE ]

That's a very different issue.

[IrishHand]

[ QUOTE ]
I don't want to get into another big debate about whether he did or didn't; the anti-war crowd wanted proof of WMD, and we finally have some. I think it is more likely than not that we find more WMDs in the future.

[/ QUOTE ]
It's been over a year since we occupied and ostensibly assumed control of Iraq. I could have brought WMD to Iraq in that time - I can't imagine why it's taken so long for our government to "find" something in that time. (And frankly, as another poster observed, if this is the best we can come up with, that's pretty pathetic.)

[elwoodblues]

I agree. Whether there were/are WMDs is just the threshhold question. The next question (among others) is whether the existence of the WMDs justified war.

[MMMMMM]

By Kenneth R. Timmerman
© 2004 Insight/News World Communications Inc.

Posted: April 26, 2004
1:36 p.m. Eastern

"New evidence out of Iraq suggests the U.S. effort to track down Saddam Hussein's missing weapons of mass destruction is having better success than is being reported.

Key assertions by the intelligence community widely judged in the media and by critics of President Bush as having been false are turning out to have been true after all.

But this stunning news has received little attention from the major media, and the president's critics continue to insist that "no weapons" have been found.

In virtually every case -- chemical, biological, nuclear and ballistic missiles -- the United States has found the weapons and the programs that the Iraqi dictator successfully concealed for 12 years from U.N. weapons inspectors.

The Iraq Survey Group, ISG, whose intelligence analysts are managed by Charles Duelfer, a former State Department official and deputy chief of the U.N.-led arms-inspection teams, has found "hundreds of cases of activities that were prohibited" under U.N. Security Council resolutions, a senior administration official tells Insight.

"There is a long list of charges made by the U.S. that have been confirmed, but none of this seems to mean anything because the weapons that were unaccounted for by the United Nations remain unaccounted for."

Both Duelfer and his predecessor, David Kay, reported to Congress that the evidence they had found on the ground in Iraq showed Saddam's regime was in "material violation" of U.N. Security Council Resolution 1441, the last of 17 resolutions that promised "serious consequences" if Iraq did not make a complete disclosure of its weapons programs and dismantle them in a verifiable manner.

The United States cited Iraq's refusal to comply with these demands as one justification for going to war.

Both Duelfer and Kay found Iraq had "a clandestine network of laboratories and safe houses with equipment that was suitable to continuing its prohibited chemical- and biological-weapons [BW] programs," the official said. "They found a prison laboratory where we suspect they tested biological weapons on human subjects."

They found equipment for "uranium-enrichment centrifuges" whose only plausible use was as part of a clandestine nuclear-weapons program. In all these cases, "Iraqi scientists had been told before the war not to declare their activities to the U.N. inspectors," the official said.

But while the president's critics and the media might plausibly hide behind ambiguity and a lack of sensational-looking finds for not reporting some discoveries, in the case of Saddam's ballistic-missile programs they have no excuse for their silence.

"Where were the missiles? We found them," another senior administration official told Insight.

"Saddam Hussein's prohibited missile programs are as close to a slam dunk as you will ever find for violating United Nations resolutions," the first official said. Both senior administration officials spoke to Insight on condition that neither their name nor their agency be identified, but their accounts of what the United States has found in Iraq coincided in every major area.

When former weapons inspector Kay reported to Congress in January that the United States had found "no stockpiles" of forbidden weapons in Iraq, his conclusions made front-page news. But when he detailed what the ISG had found in testimony before the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence last October, few took notice.

Among Kay's revelations, which officials tell Insight have been amplified in subsequent inspections in recent weeks:

* A prison laboratory complex that may have been used for human testing of BW agents and "that Iraqi officials working to prepare the U.N. inspections were explicitly ordered not to declare to the U.N." Why was Saddam interested in testing biological-warfare agents on humans if he didn't have a biological-weapons program?

* "Reference strains" of a wide variety of biological-weapons agents were found beneath the sink in the home of a prominent Iraqi BW scientist. "We thought it was a big deal," a senior administration official said. "But it has been written off [by the press] as a sort of 'starter set.'"

* New research on BW-applicable agents, brucella and Congo-Crimean hemorrhagic fever, and continuing work on ricin and aflatoxin that were not declared to the United Nations.

* A line of unmanned aerial vehicles, UAVs, or drones, "not fully declared at an undeclared production facility and an admission that they had tested one of their declared UAVs out to a range of 500 kilometers [311 miles], 350 kilometers [217 miles] beyond the permissible limit."

* "Continuing covert capability to manufacture fuel propellant useful only for prohibited Scud-variant missiles, a capability that was maintained at least until the end of 2001 and that cooperating Iraqi scientists have said they were told to conceal from the U.N."

* "Plans and advanced design work for new long-range missiles with ranges up to at least 1,000 kilometers [621 miles] -- well beyond the 150-kilometer-range limit [93 miles] imposed by the U.N. Missiles of a 1,000-kilometer range would have allowed Iraq to threaten targets throughout the Middle East, including Ankara [Turkey], Cairo [Egypt] and Abu Dhabi [United Arab Emirates]."

In addition, through interviews with Iraqi scientists, seized documents and other evidence, the ISG learned the Iraqi government had made "clandestine attempts between late 1999 and 2002 to obtain from North Korea technology related to 1,300-kilometer-range [807 miles] ballistic missiles -- probably the No Dong -- 300-kilometer-range [186 miles] antiship cruise missiles and other prohibited military equipment," Kay reported.

In testimony before Congress on March 30, Duelfer, revealed the ISG had found evidence of a "crash program" to construct new plants capable of making chemical- and biological-warfare agents.

The ISG also found a previously undeclared program to build a "high-speed rail gun," a device apparently designed for testing nuclear-weapons materials. That came in addition to 500 tons of natural uranium stockpiled at Iraq's main declared nuclear site south of Baghdad, which International Atomic Energy Agency spokesman Mark Gwozdecky acknowledged to Insight had been intended for "a clandestine nuclear-weapons program."

In taking apart Iraq's clandestine procurement network, Duelfer said his investigators had discovered that "the primary source of illicit financing for this system was oil smuggling conducted through government-to-government protocols negotiated with neighboring countries [and] from kickback payments made on contracts set up through the U.N. oil-for-food program."

What the president's critics and the media widely have portrayed as the most dramatic failure of the U.S. case against Saddam has been the claimed failure to find "stockpiles" of chemical and biological weapons. But in a June 2003 Washington Post op-ed, former chief U.N. weapons inspector Rolf Ekeus called such criticism "a distortion and a trivialization of a major threat to international peace and security."

The October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate on Iraqi Weapons of Mass Destruction concluded that Saddam "probably has stocked at least 100 metric tons [MT] and possibly as much as 500 MT of CW [chemical warfare] agents -- much of it added in the last year."

That assessment was based, in part, on conclusions contained in the final report from U.N. weapons inspectors in 1999, which highlighted discrepancies in what the Iraqis reported to the United Nations and the amount of precursor chemicals U.N. arms inspectors could document Iraq had imported but for which it no longer could account.

Until now, Bush's critics say, no stockpiles of CW agents made with those precursors have been found. The snap conclusion they draw is that the administration "lied" to the American people to create a pretext for invading Iraq.

But what are "stockpiles" of CW agents supposed to look like? Was anyone seriously expecting Saddam to have left behind freshly painted warehouses packed with chemical munitions, all neatly laid out in serried rows, with labels written in English?

Or did they think that a captured Saddam would guide U.S. troops to smoking vats full of nerve gas in an abandoned factory?

Stockpiles found

In fact, as recent evidence made public by a former operations officer for the Coalition Provisional Authority's intelligence unit in Iraq shows, some of those stockpiles have been found - not all at once, and not all in nice working order -- but found all the same.

Douglas Hanson was a U.S. Army cavalry reconnaissance officer for 20 years, and a veteran of Gulf War I. He was an atomic demolitions munitions security officer and a nuclear, biological and chemical defense officer. As a civilian analyst in Iraq last summer, he worked for an operations intelligence unit of the CPA in Iraq, and later, with the newly formed Ministry of Science and Technology, which was responsible for finding new, nonlethal employment for Iraqi WMD scientists.

In an interview with Insight and in an article he wrote for the online magazine AmericanThinker.com, Hanson examines reports from U.S. combat units and public information confirming that many of Iraq's CW stockpiles have indeed been found.

Until now, however, journalists have devoted scant attention to this evidence, in part because it contradicts the story line they have been putting forward since the U.S.-led inspections began after the war.

But another reason for the media silence may stem from the seemingly undramatic nature of the "finds" Hanson and others have described. The materials that constitute Saddam's chemical-weapons "stockpiles" look an awful lot like pesticides, which they indeed resemble.

"Pesticides are the key elements in the chemical-agent arena," Hanson says. "In fact, the general pesticide chemical formula (organophosphate) is the 'grandfather' of modern-day nerve agents."

The United Nations was fully aware that Saddam had established his chemical-weapons plants under the guise of a permitted civilian chemical-industry infrastructure. Plants inspected in the early 1990s as CW production facilities had been set up to appear as if they were producing pesticides, or in the case of a giant plant near Fallujah, chlorine, which is used to produce mustard gas.

When coalition forces entered Iraq, "huge warehouses and caches of 'commercial and agricultural' chemicals were seized and painstakingly tested by Army and Marine chemical specialists," Hanson writes. "What was surprising was how quickly the ISG refuted the findings of our ground forces and how silent they have been on the significance of these caches."

Caches of "commercial and agricultural" chemicals don't match the expectation of "stockpiles" of chemical weapons. But, in fact, that is precisely what they are. "At a very minimum," Hanson tells Insight, "they were storing the precursors to restart a chemical-warfare program very quickly."

Kay and Duelfer came to a similar conclusion, telling Congress under oath that Saddam had built new facilities and stockpiled the materials to relaunch production of chemical and biological weapons at a moment's notice. At Karbala, U.S. troops stumbled upon 55-gallon drums of pesticides at what appeared to be a very large "agricultural supply" area, Hanson says. Some of the drums were stored in a "camouflaged bunker complex" that was shown to reporters -- with unpleasant results.

"More than a dozen soldiers, a Knight-Ridder reporter, a CNN cameraman, and two Iraqi POWs came down with symptoms consistent with exposure to a nerve agent," Hanson says. "But later ISG tests resulted in a proclamation of negative, end of story, nothing to see here, etc., and the earlier findings and injuries dissolved into nonexistence. Left unexplained is the small matter of the obvious pains taken to disguise the cache of ostensibly legitimate pesticides. One wonders about the advantage an agricultural-commodities business gains by securing drums of pesticide in camouflaged bunkers 6 feet underground. The 'agricultural site' was also colocated with a military ammunition dump -- evidently nothing more than a coincidence in the eyes of the ISG."

That wasn't the only significant find by coalition troops of probable CW stockpiles, Hanson believes. Near the northern Iraqi town of Bai'ji, where Saddam had built a chemical-weapons plant known to the United States from nearly 12 years of inspections, elements of the 4th Infantry Division found 55-gallon drums containing a substance identified through mass spectrometry analysis as cyclosarin -- a nerve agent.

Nearby were surface-to-surface and surface-to-air missiles, gas masks and a mobile laboratory that could have been used to mix chemicals at the site.

"Of course, later tests by the experts revealed that these were only the ubiquitous pesticides that everybody was turning up," Hanson says. "It seems Iraqi soldiers were obsessed with keeping ammo dumps insect-free, according to the reading of the evidence now enshrined by the conventional wisdom that 'no WMD stockpiles have been discovered.'"

At Taji -- an Iraqi weapons complex as large as the District of Columbia -- U.S. combat units discovered more "pesticides" stockpiled in specially built containers, smaller in diameter but much longer than the standard 55-gallon drum.

Hanson says he still recalls the military sending digital images of the canisters to his office, where his boss at the Ministry of Science and Technology translated the Arabic-language markings. "They were labeled as pesticides," he says. "Gee, you sure have got a lot of pesticides stored in ammo dumps."

Again, this January, Danish forces found 120-millimeter mortar shells filled with a mysterious liquid that initially tested positive for blister agents. But subsequent tests by the United States disputed that finding.

"If it wasn't a chemical agent, what was it?" Hanson asks. "More pesticides? Dish-washing detergent? From this old soldier's perspective, I gain nothing from putting a liquid in my mortar rounds unless that stuff will do bad things to the enemy."

The discoveries Hanson describes are not dramatic. And that's the problem: Finding real stockpiles in grubby ammo dumps doesn't fit the image the media and the president's critics carefully have fed to the public of what Iraq's weapons ought to look like. A senior administration official who has gone through the intelligence reporting from Iraq as well as the earlier reports from U.N. arms inspectors refers to another well-documented allegation.

"The Iraqis admitted they had made 3.9 tons of VX," a powerful nerve gas, but claimed they had never weaponized it. The U.N. inspectors "felt they had more. But where did it go?" The Iraqis never provided any explanation of what had happened to their VX stockpiles.

What does 3.9 tons of VX look like? "It could fit in one large garage," the official says. Assuming, of course, that Saddam would assemble every bit of VX gas his scientists had produced at a single site, that still amounts to one large garage in an area the size of the state of California.

Senior administration officials stress that the investigation will continue as inspectors comb through millions of pages of documents in Iraq and attempt to interview Iraqi weapons scientists who have been trained all their professional lives to conceal their activities from the outside world.

"The conditions under which the ISG is working are not very conducive," one official said. "But this president wants the truth to come out. This is not an exercise in spinning or censoring.""

Kenneth R. Timmerman is a senior writer for Insight.

http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=38213

[B-Man]

[ QUOTE ]
It's been over a year since we occupied and ostensibly assumed control of Iraq. I could have brought WMD to Iraq in that time - I can't imagine why it's taken so long for our government to "find" something in that time.

[/ QUOTE ]

1. Iraq is the size of California.

2. Why is "find" in quotation marks? I can't wait to hear this...

[IrishHand]

[ QUOTE ]
1. Iraq is the size of California.

[/ QUOTE ]
If someone told me that they knew that the Governator was hiding WMD in California and that they had both proof of their existence and evidence of their location, and then proceeded to occupy the State and turn up...exactly nothing in a year of occupation - well, I'm sorry - I wouldn't be too impressed with their 12-months-too-late discovery of not much of anything. This isn't like we're looking for a needle in a hastack...we're (in theory) obliterating a government and crippling a nation because we apparently knew they were a threat and knew they had WMD. They were supposed to have large quantities of needles in that hackstack, and we were supposed to know where they were.

[ QUOTE ]
2. Why is "find" in quotation marks? I can't wait to hear this...

[/ QUOTE ]
Who discovered these "WMDs"? If China invaded Japan claiming the presence of WMDs and then one year into their occupation the Chinese military hoisted up a weapon buried by the side of a road and trumpeted that as in some way justifying their actions, I'd laugh - as would you and any other sensible individual. More importantly, military news releases are about as reliable a source of factual news as the Daily Show on Comedy Central.

Fortunately, there's no need for any of us to be too concerned about these "reports" - they're about as persuasive a OJ's defense:

"Investigators are trying to determine how insurgents obtained these weapons — whether they were looted or supplied."
Translation: We have no idea where this stuff came from.

"it's thought that fighters there may be upping their attacks on U.S. forces by using such weapons."
Translation: The partisans were holding back before. Now they're pulling out the big guns!

"The Iraqi Survey Group is a U.S. organization whose task was to search for weapons of mass destruction after the ouster of Saddam Hussein in last year's invasion."
Translation: This fine, clearly unbiased and lacking in ulterior motive group has been 0-fer-the-past-year.

Ultimatley, if you want to hang your hat on a FoxNews report based on military reports from an occupying military under extreme duress to come up with something positive to deflect attention from widely reported abuses and directed by an administration desperate for something - anything - resembling good news, best of luck to ya!

[B-Man]

[ QUOTE ]
This isn't like we're looking for a needle in a hastack...we're (in theory) obliterating a government and crippling a nation because we apparently knew they were a threat and knew they had WMD. They were supposed to have large quantities of needles in that hackstack, and we were supposed to know where they were.

[/ QUOTE ]

It takes quite a leap of faith to believe that Iraq had two and only two (just like Omaha) chemical weapons. Do you really think they decided to make two chemical shells, and no more? Obviously, we just haven't found the others yet, either because they were well-hidden, have been destroyed or moved (presumably to Syria).

[ QUOTE ]
Who discovered these "WMDs"?

[/ QUOTE ]

You can conjecture all you want about a conspiracy, but until there is a shred of proof that we planted these WMD, this isn't worth my time.

[HDPM]

It is suspicious the day after Secretary Powell's little interview debacle. His aide tries to shut him up before he gives a seemingly honest answer on a related question. Then the sarin story hits. Pure coincidence probably

[Utah]

I agree it doesnt prove anything. However, why do the liberals and the anti-war crowd have such a selective memory. Why do they simply ignore those in their own party (Clinton and gang) that insisted Saddam had these weapons and was a threat? Where were their protests then (gosh - you dont think that their moral outrage is really politically motivated and they are simply led like sheep by their party leaders do ya?) They act like Bush pulled these claims out of thin air. Why is it that there wasnt a government in the world saying Saddam didnt have these weapons before the war? Why didnt Saddam provide a complete accounting when he could have prevented the war?

Why cannot they not see the folly of their own logic? - Bush and company attack Iraq, using the WMDs as ONE of many arguments. They know this to be false and they know that they will never find the weapons and that they will get their ass handed to them when their lies are found out. Regardless, they plow ahead with a political disaster because they are just hell bent on doin some killin. hm.........

[Chris Alger]

Aren't you even slightly daunted by Timmerman given how he made a fool out of you over the "French oil contract" conspiracy?

Here he is with more propaganda for dumb guys. Same formula: start with sensational claims that you never prove(because your audience generally won't read beyond this point), use last year's news [Kay's testimony] as the main ingredient to lead up to half-assed speculation and conspiracy theories from friendly sources.

Note how he begins: "Key assertions ... are turning out to have been true;" "stunning news"; a "long list of charges made by the U.S. that are confirmed." And the big whopper: "In virtually every case -- chemical, biological, nuclear and ballistic missiles -- the United States has found the weapons...."

The U.S. has found nuclear weapons? Well, no, not exactly "nuclear" "weapons." Reading below, it turns out the Timmerman is referring to the uranium that the IAEA had been inspecting for years, which Iraq had fully declared a long time ago. "That came in addition to 500 tons of natural uranium stockpiled at Iraq's main declared nuclear site south of Baghdad, which International Atomic Energy Agency spokesman Mark Gwozdecky acknowledged to Insight had been intended for "a clandestine nuclear-weapons program." Note how Timmerman buries the "declared" in the middle of the sentence without explaining that we knew about this uranium for years and could care less.

Then Timmerman says this about the testimony of Kay's hand-picked replacement: "In testimony before Congress on March 30, Duelfer, revealed the ISG had found evidence of a "crash program" to construct new plants capable of making chemical-and biological-warfare agents."

But here's what Deufler really said (http://www.cia.gov/cia/public_affairs/speeches/2004/tenet_testimony_03302004.html) really said about the "crash program": <ul type="square"> There were plans under the direction of a leading nuclear scientist/WMD program manager to construct plants capable of making a variety of chemicals and producing a year’s supply of any chemical in a month. This was a crash program. Most of the chemicals specified in this program were conventional commercial chemicals, but a few are considered “dual use.” [/list] So no weapons stockpiles, or even the capability of producing them, but "plans to construct" plants that, if built, could then be used for a "crash program" to produce not weapons but mostly "conventional commercial chemicals," a few of which "are considered 'dual use.'"

The rest of it is speculation that the pesticides found weren't really pesticides, but nothing new regarding actual evidence.

How could anyone be so gullible?

[nicky g]

So were conventional explosives; in fact to much greater effect.

[Chris Alger]

One artillery shell with "some sarin" but whose explosion caused a "very limited" dispersal, so that two "ordinance team members were treated for minor exposure to nerve agent." And "mustard gas discovered seperately" (headline) which turns out to be "ineffective" because it was "improperly stored" (buried in text).

Thank God we only had to kill 10,000 civilians to remove this plague of mass destruction. Who knows how many people -- a dozen, a score -- we might have saved from minor exposure to nerve agent as soon as Saddam figured out how to fire an artillery shell 10,000 miles.

[GWB]

[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
Does anyone with more knowledge than myself (not too terribly high a standard) know if mustard gas is/should be considered a wmd? I know it is a chemical weapon, but are all chemical weapons wmds? I thought wmds were a subset of several different types of weapons classes - e.g. nuclear, biological, nucular (couldn't resist), and chemical.

Either way, if true, this is good news (in that we found some) and bad news (in that they were used).


[/ QUOTE ]Hi Elwood:

It certainly should be. It was used to great effect by the Germans on the Russian Front in World War I.

Best wishes,
Mason


[/ QUOTE ]So were conventional explosives; in fact to much greater effect.

[/ QUOTE ]
When you suggest that conventional weapons are worse than chemical weapons, are you trying to diminish the impact of the discovery of WMDs for political purposes?

[nicky g]

I'll leave those to you. The fact is that chemical weapons are not capable of mass destruction unless fired in massive quantities (whi9ch Saddam didn't have, but regardless), usually from artillery pieces. Any weapon fired in massive quantities is capable of mass destruction. The Japanese cult killed a massive eight people on the Tokyo subway with sarin. The Madrid train bombers killed 200 with conventional bombs. Chemical weapons, whether this represents a genuine find or not, do not justify the term weapons of mass destruction as they are no more destructive than conventional explosives - probably less so. I wrote the same about Ghaddaffi's alleged WMDs several months ago.

[nicky g]

The weapons inspectors pointed out a dozen times that even if Saddam did still have any mustard gas left it, along with most of the other stockpiles he was alleged to have, would have deteroriated beyond any usefulness years previously. Now the alleged discovery of one such expired but technically undestroyed weapon is news?

[John Cole]

Note also the use of the word "virtually," which means "in essence but not in fact." Advertising copywriters know how to use these "weasel words" effectively.

[MMMMMM]

[ QUOTE ]
Aren't you even slightly daunted by Timmerman given how he made a fool out of you over the "French oil contract" conspiracy?

[/ QUOTE ]

Huh? If you still think UN officials and the French weren't getting any kickbacks from Saddam....jeez...I thought I WON that argument with Cyrus, although you did bring up some better though nonconclusive points. The corruption of the oil-for-food program has been in the papers and the UN is currently trying to block companies from releasing records.

As for the rest of your post, you seem to be wanting proof right now instead of merely more evidence. Evidence has been accumulating, and this article provides some more. The more evidence, including circumstantial evidence, the stronger the case gets, right? It doesn't all have to all be conclusive in order to have merit.

You are the quintessential defense attorney--except when you are on the prosecuting side, of course.

And talking about gullible--anyone who before the war thought that Saddam had no WMD programs was gullible.Now, after the war, anyone who is certain that Saddam had no WMD programs is gullible too--although now there is much more room for doubt. You, Cyrus and much of the press seem mighty sure that the WMD claims were ALL wrong. To me that is a far more gullible attitude than simply adjusting the barometer of likelihood. And at this point I would say that barometer is somewhere in the middle of the range.

[MMMMMM]

Nicky, the point is that artillery shells fired in mass quantity and augmented with gas can indeed kill many more people. The area of effect is significantly increased for each shell and thus a wider pattern can be used which yet kills more people.

The Baron (a different one from dcifrths, I believe) has posted extensive technical information on such things.

Also, the chemicals can ruin the soil for a long time.

[MMMMMM]

I don't think the point of the article is to prove everything conclusively. Evidence keeps accumulating; we'll see where it all leads as it is gradually put together. When enough evidence has accumulated, or enough time has passed, a better conclusion may be reached.

I think it should be pretty clear that the folks who absolutely denied Saddam had any WMD or WMD programs are wrong--as are those who claimed his programs were massive and very soon to be a major threat. The questions are: to what extent did he have WMD or WMD programs, and were such merely remnants of programs long since discontinued, or active and dangerous programs. I think the jury's still out, and should be still out. Also, the questiuon of intelligence failures is important and should continue to be addressed.

[ThaSaltCracka]

One does not need to be hit by the sheel containing chemical weapons to die. An army can lay down several rounds of mustard gas and kill hundreds of men with ease(if they do not have a gas mask). Partly because wind can carry the gas several hundred feet. Conventional shells must fall either on or near their target to have any effect.
Mustard gas is most definitely a WMD, and if you don't think that, look back at your WW I history. The numbers don't lie. Or you can look at the pictures of Iraqi Kurds who died because of gasing. While, I do agree, that conventional shells can kill just as many people, they cannot do it with the effeciency and ease of chemical weapons.

[Cyrus]

and let the facts hit you on the head. Believe me, the knock will do you a world of good!

"If you still think UN officials and the French weren't getting any kickbacks from Saddam....jeez..."

You still cling on that howler? I didn't expect of course that you'd realize immediately the logic inconsistency of your claims (French no stupid --&gt; Check! --&gt; French wanna Iraqi oil? --&gt; If so, then French befriend Yanks so French can get hands on oil --&gt; But French oppose Yanks! --&gt; Hmmm --&gt; Maybe French NOT after oil? --&gt; Oooh la la --&gt; Tu es vraiment un con!). But I thought that after a coupla weeks it'd somehow sink into your, well, brain. Silly me.

"I thought I WON that argument with Cyrus."

Yes, yes, conclusively. Sleep happy.

"You, Cyrus and much of the press seem mighty sure that the WMD claims were ALL wrong."

They were. Your White House and your State Secretary have all but admitted it. You are dragging your feet. Even Dubya is ahead of you.

"To me that is a far more gullible attitude than simply adjusting the barometer of likelihood."

This little attempt at a literary flight of fancy is actually very revealing of your mind set, which distorts the perception of reality in order to fit your ideology and convictions. You don’t adjust the barometer, doofus!..

[Cyrus]

Read back again what you wrote :

"I don't think the point of the article is to prove everything conclusively. Evidence keeps accumulating; we'll see where it all leads as it is gradually put together. When enough evidence has accumulated, or enough time has passed, a better conclusion may be reached."

And from those wussy words, you change tack to absolute certainty :

"I think it should be pretty clear that the folks who absolutely denied Saddam had any WMD or WMD programs are wrong."

What ?!

"I think the jury's still out, and should be still out."

Yeah, keep the jury out -- because if it returns with a verdict, you know it in your heart what it'll be : Dubya's pants on fire.

[Cyrus]

They was just gettin' their picture taken for crying out loud.

[MMMMMM]

When and if it is PROVED that UN officials were involved in corruption with the oil-for-food affair--rather than merely seeming likely--you will have many words to eat. Investigations are ongoing and the UN is doing it's best to obstruct and delay (of course). So far it appears that some top officials received credits to sell oil and personally profited millions.

And yes, Cyrus, you do adjust your level of certainty as more information comes in--that's what I meant by the barometer illustration. Sorry if it was somehow confusing, though.

[elwoodblues]

[ QUOTE ]
Partly because wind can carry the gas several hundred feet

[/ QUOTE ]

That's the gist of my question. Does wind make mustard gas (or other chemical weapons) more or less effective? Your contention is that the wind makes it more effective because it carries the gas to more people. Others contend that wind makes it less effective because it dissipates the gas and, while reaching more people the dissipated gas no longer has the danger that it once possessed.

[elwoodblues]

[ QUOTE ]
Now the alleged discovery of one such expired but technically undestroyed weapon is news?

[/ QUOTE ]

Let's be reasonable. It's news. It's probably even front page news. The question is how big of news it is. If nothing more comes of it, it is small news...if it leads to larger discoveries, it is big news.

[MMMMMM]

The jury should still be out as to what extent Saddam's WMD/WMD programs were active and potentially serious threats, versus being mere remnants of once dangerous weapons and programs.

More clear now?

[MMMMMM]

True, elwood. And while I don't think Nicky is especially guilty of it, the overall tendency of many on the "no WMD" camp is to scoff at every piece of possible evidence that comes along on the other side.

Again, I'm not singling out Nicky or even addressing this to him, but: the position of many on that side of the opinion fence seems to be set fairly in stone. At least many on the other side--including in the administration--have not had trouble accepting contrary evidence as it was discovered or admitting they were at least partially wrong. If you listen to some--say Kennedy, or say Cyrus, for instance--you'd think it was already proved that Saddam didn't have WMDs or WMD programs.

[Cyrus]

"When and if it is proved that UN officials were involved in corruption with the oil-for-food affair, you will have many words to eat."

What does that have to do with anything? What words am I supposed to eat, relevant to the UN program?

I never said the UN program was not corrupt (it probably was, to a certain extent). But where does this come in? I wrote that the French supported the UN oil-for-food program, corruption or not, because they wanted to stop American unilateralism. You wrote that the French opposed the American invasion and supported UN diplomacy because ...they were after "Saddam's fat oil contracts"!

The imperfection of the UN program had nothing to do with the invasion. The United States did not invade Iraq because "the UN program was corrupt"! The United States invaded Iraq because Saddam Hussein possessed Weapons of Mass Destruction. So... where are them Weapons, Sherlock?

(And let me give you a li'l tip about not coming off as silly as you do when you are arguing a point :

When you wanna say to someone "When X happens you will be sorry", you DON'T say "When and if X happens". Clear ?)

[Cyrus]

"The jury should still be out as to what extent Saddam's WMD/WMD programs were active and potentially serious threats, versus being mere remnants of once dangerous weapons and programs."

No, the jury has returned with a verdict on that one already. It is no longer disputed that Saddam did NOT possess at the time the United States invaded Iraq any WMD programs that were "active and potentially serious threats". That much we already know for sure and the U.S. administration has already acknowledged that there is a lot to be said about American intelligence or lack thereof, in the matter.

What the jury is still out on, is how long before the invasion had Saddam got rid of the WMDs he had. (The UN inspectors said a long time before that; the evidence that Mr Kay found indicate the same; the lack of any substantial WMDs or program discovered by the American occupying force indicates the same. But, of course, you are free to stay out with your jury as much as you like.)

[MMMMMM]

M: "The jury should still be out as to what extent Saddam's WMD/WMD programs were active and potentially serious threats, versus being mere remnants of once dangerous weapons and programs."

Cyrus: "No, the jury has returned with a verdict on that one already. It is no longer disputed that Saddam did NOT possess at the time the United States invaded Iraq any WMD programs that were "active and potentially serious threats"."


Wrong, it has not been proven that Saddam had no WMD programs that were active and that may have had the potential to be serious threats. Even David Kay did not give Iraq an entirely clean bill of health.

Arguing with you is like talking to a brick wall: your mind is already made up.

[Chris Alger]

[ QUOTE ]
Evidence has been accumulating, and this article provides some more.

[/ QUOTE ]
"THOUSANDS OF TONS" of WMDs stockpiles, you said. Now that its been proven to be a hoax, you pretend you and Bush never said it.

M: "Over there stands a building."
Me: "But no one sees a building over there."
M: "I have these blueprints, and blueprints are circumstantial evidence of a building. The more blueprints I find, the more evidence of a building I'll have."

Remember the laundry list of WHY WE NEEDED TO KILL 10,000 CIVILIANS:

1. It was morally right for the U.S. to turn Iraq from a Saddam dictatorship into a U.S. dictatorship, which the Orwellian fantacists (like you) call "liberation."

2. We needed to selectively enforce UN resolutions, meaning only those against Iraq while preventing enforcement efforts for dozens of resolutions against U.S. clients like Israel, Turkey and Morocco. This is how we give the UN real teeth and prevent it from turning into a powerless "debating society."

3. Iraq has stockpiles of WMD that it will either use against us or that it intends to give to terrorists to use against us.

So far, no evidence at all, not a scintilla as we lawyers say, has been unearthed suggesting that Iraq ever intended to use WMD beyond its borders or give them to terrorists, any more than Israel plans to use its WMD or give its WMD to terrorists. Therefore, the issue of whether Iraq had or still has WMDs is merely the first step of a two-pronged proof negated by the obvious falsity of the second prong, given all the caputred documents and witnesses and our evident diligence in making them talk.

Nevertheless, war proponents insisted again and again that the purported existence of huge stockpiles of "unaccounted for" WMD proved the need for war. Now we have Kay and Bush and Powell and the whole chain of command admitted that they have no evidence of huge stockpiles, and in fact never had any such evidence.

In a pathetic effort to mask your shameful appearance and salve your immeasurable guilt, you're now pretending that plans for future WMD ("programs" or or "program-related" things, like dreams) amount to "circumstantial evidence" of WMD stockpiles. In fact, the two are mutually exclusive: if the best evidence concerning WMD are "programs" instead of actual production ability, then the best evidence tends to disprove the existence of stockpiles and production ability, just as when the only evidence of a "building" amoutns to "blueprints" we can rest assured that no building exists.

Note that you can't point to a single prewar statement by any Bush administration official asserting that the war would be justified even if Saddam had no stockpiles of WMD, but a hypothetical ability to build WMD at some point in the future. Further proof that the great Iraqi WMD search was a monumental hoax to justify the slaughter of thousands.

[paland]

[ QUOTE ]
New evidence out of Iraq suggests

[/ QUOTE ]
This crap is from a conservative right wing organization and should never be taken seriously. It is all crap. Brought to you from the "Scientists from UCLA discover that the Bible's 'Genisis' is true." crowd. These wacko's make up more crap than my dog on exlax.

[MMMMMM]

[ QUOTE ]
"THOUSANDS OF TONS" of WMDs stockpiles, you said. Now that its been proven to be a hoax, you pretend you and Bush never said it.

[/ QUOTE ]

That's a lie; I never pretended I never said it.

[ QUOTE ]
Chris Alger: M: "Over there stands a building."
Me: "But no one sees a building over there."
M: "I have these blueprints, and blueprints are circumstantial evidence of a building. The more blueprints I find, the more evidence of a building I'll have."

[/ QUOTE ]

Bad analogy. Better are the proscribed missiles, the BW found in an Iraqi scientists home, the massive amounts of fertilizer (used in making nerve agents) found at military sites.



[ QUOTE ]
Remember the laundry list of WHY WE NEEDED TO KILL 10,000 CIVILIANS:

[/ QUOTE ]

Of course you leave out the number of civilians saved from Saddam's murder/torture machine--as you always do, in your propagandist, one-sided arithmetic of lives.

[ QUOTE ]
1. It was morally right for the U.S. to turn Iraq from a Saddam dictatorship into a U.S. dictatorship, which the Orwellian fantacists (like you) call "liberation."

[/ QUOTE ]

So you think Saddam's regime was preferable? That would be a laughable assertion if it weren't so sick and sad.

[ QUOTE ]
2. We needed to selectively enforce UN resolutions, meaning only those against Iraq while preventing enforcement efforts for dozens of resolutions against U.S. clients like Israel, Turkey and Morocco. This is how we give the UN real teeth and prevent it from turning into a powerless "debating society."

[/ QUOTE ]

The U.N. has always essentially been a powerless debating society and coffee-club. Iraq however not only violated U.N. Resolutions, but also the terms of the 1991 cease-fire aggreement, repeatedly. The best thing that could be done with the U.N. is kick it out of the USA and use the building for a giant drug rehab center.

[ QUOTE ]
3. Iraq has stockpiles of WMD that it will either use against us or that it intends to give to terrorists to use against us.

[/ QUOTE ]

Not as thought, but some programs were probably not entirely defunct. Also, where, for instance, did al-Qaeda get the VX agent it was about to try to kill 80,000 peopl;e in Jordan with? Maybe it was of pre-war Iraqi origin? One thing's for sure: al-Qaeda sure as hel didn't make it themselves.

&lt;snip assorted rant and accusations&gt;

You seem to forget that the burden of proof was on Saddam. Now you want to turn it around, ignore any slowly building pieces of evidence for WMD programs, and cry foul about everything. Yet Saddam had it in his power to avert war if he had just come clean: he had how many chances over how many years, now?

And BTW I harbor no guilt at all about the war. Purely from the Iraqis' perspective, they are FAR better off than before the war when they lived under a despot. Of course, that doesn't matter at all to you: you'd rather see them keep getting tortured and killed than have the U.S. liberate them. What an evil and non-empathic worldview.

[andyfox]

As far as Clinton saying the same thing about Saddam and WMDs, I have long maintained that the Clinton and current Bush administration have virtually the same foreign policy objectives and outlooks. But Bush went to war over them. Nobody really cared what Clinton said (especially since whatever he said had to be taken with fifty or so grains of salt); but Bush took us to war over the asertions.

I don't find it strange that, if it's so, Bush and his gang pushed us into a war under false pretenses, knowing they'd be found out on a few issues in the end. Happens all the time (although usually under Democrats). I think an array of factors led to the war and that one of them was indeed that they were hellbent on going into Iraq. It's not yet a political disaster, and may not be: Bush is still the favorite to win the next election.

[Chris Alger]

[ QUOTE ]
I never pretended I never said it.

[/ QUOTE ]
Effectively you are. You alleged stockpiles existed now. When no stockpiles were found now you are pretending to have "circumstamtial evidence" for your claim based on "plans" for facilities that might conceivably be used to create stockpiles at some unspecified time in the future. Why can't you admit that you were wrong?

[ QUOTE ]
Better are the proscribed missiles, the BW found in an Iraqi scientists home, the massive amounts of fertilizer (used in making nerve agents) found at military sites.

[/ QUOTE ]
The proscribed missiles were in the process of being destroyed when the invasion began, the BW was an unweaponized vial harmlessly kept away from terrorists for a decade, controverting your "tendency to support terror" argument. "Massive amounts of fertilizer?" What an incredibly sick joke. If you believe these items justify killing 10,000 people, you must truly crave mass murder for its own sake.

[ QUOTE ]
Of course you leave out the number of civilians saved from Saddam's murder/torture machine--as you always do, in your propagandist, one-sided arithmetic of lives.

[/ QUOTE ]
For the umpteenth time, what's the best estimate of how many people were saved from a "murder machine" that had no effective access to the groups it had murdered in the past, such as the Kurds and marsh Arabs? Since you never offer any evidence of this, we have to presume it's negligible or zero.

We kill 10,000 to replace Capone with Dillinger and you think the only people who could object are those that "favor" Capone. You dislike that comparison? Iraq is in the clutches of a regime that embraced Saddam after the zenith of his atrocities was well-known, that also supported equally repugnant regimes as they massacred similar numbers, that massacred more civilians during Vietnam than Saddam ever did, that's led by an administration that ranks Vietnam among our noble causes, that never lifted a finger to improve human rights in Iraq during Saddam's reign, that refuses to allow Iraqis to vote for whom they want, that spawned to most massive wave of street crime in Iraq's history, that turned Iraq into an economic free-fire zone without even a pretense of consulting the public, that 80% of Iraqis want to leave but refuses to even consider giving back the country as an option.

This is what so-called "conservatives" -- the real modern-day Stalinists -- call being liberated by a country dedicated to peace, freedom and democracy.

[ QUOTE ]
So you think Saddam's regime was preferable? That would be a laughable assertion if it weren't so sick and sad.

[/ QUOTE ]
For people that value the lives of Iraqis, the issue isn't whether one prefers Saddam or his accomplice, but the cost of that replacement. To vote for war based on nothing more than "preference" of one for the other demonstrates, once again, that you place the value of human life, at least Arab lives, at zero.

[ QUOTE ]
Also, where, for instance, did al-Qaeda get the VX agent it was about to try to kill 80,000 peopl;e in Jordan with?

[/ QUOTE ]
Where did you get the idea that al-Qaeda was proven to have VX? Frontpage? Newsmax? Looneytoons Times? Notice the lack of reports of samples being flown to Washington for testing and tracing, nothing about quantities, just the usual detritus dropped from the right-wing propaganda rags, trolling as always, for the gullible.

[ QUOTE ]
You seem to forget that the burden of proof was on Saddam.

[/ QUOTE ]
In civilized countries the burden of proof for advocacy of war is quite high and remains always on the shoulders of those advocating war. Only in "savage and barbaric cultures" is this standard reversed. You utter lack of regard of human life compels you to disagree, so I guess I have to accept that.

[Chris Alger]

You're only partly right. Thanks to the news media, most Americans believed that Iraq had large stockpiles of WMD and intended to use them on the U.S. Many still do. This was untrue. As a result of that false perception, hundreds of Americans and thousands of Iraqis are dead with more dying daily.

The only responsible news about "Iraqi WMD" therefore should attempt to eradicate the media's mistake. This is no different than if the media convinced most people that you could get AIDS from kissing. Any news report that has a tendency to reinforce public ignorance by definition constitutes a public disservice.

Therefore, any news story about a single artillery shell with sarin has an obligation to prominently explain why the prewar WMD claims and the impressions they created were false.

[MMMMMM]

[ QUOTE ]
You're only partly right. Thanks to the news media, most Americans believed that Iraq had large stockpiles of WMD and intended to use them on the U.S. Many still do. This was untrue. As a result of that false perception, hundreds of Americans and thousands of Iraqis are dead with more dying daily.

[/ QUOTE ]

What the hell are you talking about? "Thanks to the media"??? Every major intelligence service in the world had roughly the same impression about Iraq's WMDs. It wasn't the media's mistake.

[ QUOTE ]
The only responsible news about "Iraqi WMD" therefore should attempt to eradicate the media's mistake. This is no different than if the media convinced most people that you could get AIDS from kissing.

[/ QUOTE ]

No, it's more like if the world's foremost research labs believed you could get AIDS from kissing, and the media reported that.

[ QUOTE ]
Any news report that has a tendency to reinforce public ignorance by definition constitutes a public disservice.

[/ QUOTE ]

Everryone by now knows that there weren't WMDs to the extent thought before the war. Whether there were any WMDs beyond a few remnants is in doubt but still remains to be seen. Further, more information is coming to light as previously terrified Iraqi scientists are opening up a little and new discoveries are made.

Any attempt to paint things the way they were before the war would indeed constitute a disservice--but it is also a disservice to claim that Iraq was 100% WMD/WMD-program free. Wait and see, jeez, you like Cyrus already seem to think you know everything that matters about it. Well you don't.

Any media that reports on further discoveries or developments is doing a service, not a disservice--unless of course you think that only reports mirroring your view are worthy of being called a "service". I do think I detect the hint of a wish for liberal censorship or squelching of opposing views on your part, if I'm not mistaken.

[MMMMMM]

It appears we could go 'round about this forever.

Most deeply disturbing is your assertion that since nobody ever offered conjecture about how many would have died under Saddam's regime had he been left in power, that number "we have to presume is negligible or zero". Granted Saddam hasn't killed on truly massive scale such as with the marsh Arabs lately, but he never stopped political executions, imprisonments, tortures, rapes and disappearances. That you would use such an argument shows you are solely interested in arguing things in quasi-legal terms and have no real concern for the people in question. Further it is intellectually dishonest. You know damn well that Saddam never stopped killing or torturing people, and that there was no reason to presume he was about to stop, either. Of course you employ this tactic just because you don't want to face the moral argument that 10K lives is a relatively small price to pay to be rid of a genuine butcher and tyrant who killed many times that and kept his countrymen in a constant state of terror and subjugation. Your view is immensely immoral as is your argument that future lives saved don't mean anything. It is truly hard to imagine how he and his sons and wouldn't have kiled more than 10K slowly, if left in power. Besides, what price freedom and human dignity? Apparently in your world, you weigh only one side of things.

[Chris Alger]

[ QUOTE ]
Every major intelligence service in the world had roughly the same impression about Iraq's WMDs. It wasn't the media's mistake.

[/ QUOTE ]
No, that's just one of those right-wing lines that you keep repeating without bothering to check the facts. In reality, not a single intelligence agency in the world, including any of ours, had any evidence that Iraq maintained any stockpiles of WMD. This fact should have been mentioned in every report where an official or pundit warned about "the threat." Further, after Blix's team revealed that the best U.S. intelligence was a joke, the foreign intelligence agencies (except those in the U.K. and Israel, which offered nothing new) fell silent reagarding old speculation about WMD. Those of Germany, France and Russia, to name a few, stawartly refused to accept the existence of an Iraqi WMD threat.

As for the media, even after the intelligence speculation was largely put to rest by Blix's team, it continued to broadcast administration claims and innuendo that the stockpiles were there and ready to use. And that was the "objective" news. Right-wing pro-war partisans continued to spin fantasies of mushroom clouds and hundreds of thousands likely to be killed by imminent attack.

[ QUOTE ]
Everryone by now knows that there weren't WMDs to the extent thought before the war.

[/ QUOTE ]
Most are vaguely aware of some exaggeration and lack of discovery. Thanks to the media's pro-government slant, however, few people realize that the huge threat that terrified them had no basis in fact. People weren't afraid of WMD "programs" that amounted to hypothetical plans to build facilities, but actual WMD's. That's the way the war was sold. Thanks to reports like this one from Fox, the more gullible among them (like you and B-Man) actually believe WMD threat has been or is about to be vindicated. "More coming soon" he says. Yeah, right.

[nicky g]

"Nicky, the point is that artillery shells fired in mass quantity and augmented with gas can indeed kill many more people. The area of effect is significantly increased for each shell and thus a wider pattern can be used which yet kills more people"

Any shells fired in large quantities can kill many people. REgardless, the alleged threat from Saddam's alleged arsenal was that it could fall into the hands of terrorists who could perpetrate mass attacks on US cities. The danger from mustard gas shells is, as you point out, many being fired at once from artillery pieces at a target. I don';t think Mohammed Atta would have got very far setting up a couple of dozen howitzers in Hoboken, do you?

[nicky g]

"Partly because wind can carry the gas several hundred feet."

It can also blow it backwards on to your own lines, something both the WWI parties and Iran and Iraq found when using them, and, as elwood pointed out, is easily dissipated. Furthermore it is a lot easier to defend against (protective equipment) than a rain of high explosives.

"Mustard gas is most definitely a WMD, and if you don't think that, look back at your WW I history. "

The vast vast vast majority of people killed in WWI were killed by conventional shells and machine gun fire (and disease/infections). Gas was only effective for as long as took for both sides to invent defences against it; not very long. It wasn't a remotely decisive factor in the outcome of the war. It captures the imagination through the horrific way it kills but in this day and age it would be just as easy to kill several hundred people at once with "conventional" fuel air bombs or other heavy explosives, which are much much harder to defend against. And again, battlefield mustard gas shells are of next to no use for terrorists attacking large cities. Conventional explosives, not to mention hijacked planes, have proved both eiasier to get hold iof and far more effective.

"Or you can look at the pictures of Iraqi Kurds who died because of gasing."

ABout 5,000 Kurds died in the Hallabja gas attacks, out of a total of 200,000 killed in the Anfal campaign as a whole. What happened was horrific but Saddam evidently found it a lot easier to simply shoot the vast majority of his victims. Sustained shelling or firebombing of Hallabja would have had the same effect. Hallabja was a show piece designed to terrify people but was not remotely the main story of the Anfal massacre. Chemical weapons, unless we're talking about the ones used in "The Rock", though barbaric aren't remotely on the plain of real weapons of mass destructon such as nuclear weapons or (hypothetical) highly contagious/infectious biological weapons, and chemical battlefield weapons, which was the most Saddam was alleged to have, aren't practical terrorist tools.

[John Cole]

I'm not sure I have the right order, but why do all politicians include "the point" nowadays. And who the hell are they pointing to in the back anyway?

[nicky g]

As far as I understand it, ad correct me if I'm wrong, the main source of the billions Saddam was alleged to have made "off the oil for food programme" was in fact from selling extra oil on the black market. The UN wasn't supposed to police that, so I can't see how it or many of its officials could be more than peripeherally involved.

[nicky g]

OK it's news, but small news. An expired weapon isn't much different from a destroyed weapon. The sarin shell, if still active (not sure whether that was the case), is more significant news but as a one-off not earth shattering unless further evicence emerges to show it was more than a remnant of a once-dangerous programme, as M put it. If large stockpiles of weapons constituting a serious threat turn up, that'll be news.

[adios]

[ QUOTE ]
Therefore, any news story about a single artillery shell with sarin has an obligation to prominently explain why the prewar WMD claims and the impressions they created were false.

[/ QUOTE ]

This is truly hilarious.

[adios]

[ QUOTE ]
The UN wasn't supposed to police that, so I can't see how it or many of its officials could be more than peripeherally involved.

[/ QUOTE ]

Bunch of funny stuff in this thread. First it's Alger saying the news media ought to filter and slant it's coverage and now this. You really can't be serious. I don't think you are serious in making the above statement but just in case, here's an article that alludes to how UN officials could be more than "peripherally" involved:

Oil-for-Terror? (http://www.nationalreview.com/comment/rosett200404182336.asp)

Oil-for-Terror?
There appears to be much worse news to uncover in the Oil-for-Food scandal.

By Claudia Rosett

Beyond the billions in graft, smuggling, and lavish living for Saddam Hussein that were the hallmarks of the United Nations Oil-for-Food program in Iraq, there is one more penny yet to drop.

It's time to talk about Oil-for-Terror.

Especially with the U.N.'s own investigation into Oil-for-Food now taking shape, and more congressional hearings in the works, it is high time to focus on the likelihood that Saddam may have fiddled Oil-for-Food contracts not only to pad his own pockets, buy pals, and acquire clandestine arms — but also to fund terrorist groups, quite possibly including al Qaeda.

There are at least two links documented already. Both involve oil buyers picked by Saddam and approved by the U.N. One was a firm with close ties to a Liechtenstein trust that has since been designated by the U.N. itself as "belonging to or affiliated with Al Qaeda." The other was a Swiss-registered subsidiary of a Saudi oil firm that had close dealings with the Taliban during Osama bin Laden's 1990's heyday in Afghanistan.

These cases were reported in a carefully researched story published last June by Marc Perelman of the New York-based Forward, relying not only on interviews, but on corporate-registry documents and U.S. and U.N. terror-watch lists. It was an important dispatch but sank quickly from sight. At that stage, the U.N. was still busy praising its own $100-billion-plus Oil-for-Food program, even while trying quietly to strip out the huge graft overlay from the remaining $10 billion or so in contracts suddenly slated for handover to the U.S.-led Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA). That was shortly before the records kept in Baghdad by Saddam began surfacing in such damning profusion that Secretary-General Kofi Annan was finally forced last month to stop stonewalling and agree to an independent investigation — though just how independent remains to be seen.

As it now appears, Oil-for-Food pretty much evolved into a BCCI with a U.N. label. The stated aim of the program, which ran from 1996-2003, was to reduce the squeeze of sanctions on ordinary Iraqis by allowing Saddam to sell oil strictly to buy food and other relief supplies. As Oil-for-Food worked in practice, however, the program gave Saddam rich opportunity not only to pad his own pockets, but to fund almost anything and anyone else he chose, while the U.N. assured the world that all was well. (For the full saga, see my article in the May issue of Commentary, "The Oil-for-Food Scam: What Did Kofi Annan Know and When Did He Know It?").

For a sample of the latitude enjoyed by Saddam, there's Treasury's announcement last week that the U.S., in its latest round of efforts to recover Saddam's loot, is asking U.N. member states to freeze the assets of a worldwide group of eight front companies and five individuals that were "procuring weapons, skimming funds, operating for the Iraqi Intelligence Service, and doing business in support of the fallen Saddam Hussein regime." The list includes a Dubai-based firm, Al Wasel &amp; Babel General Trading, a major contractor under the Oil-for-Food program that turned out to be a front company set up by Saddam's regime specifically to sell goods (and procure arms) via the program — right under the U.N.'s approving eye. Indeed, Al Wasel &amp; Babel's website boasts that the company was set up in 1999 especially to "cater to the needs of Iraq Government under 'Oil for Food Program.' "

HOW SADDAM GOT HIS WAY
In this context, which suggests just how easily money might also have been passed right along to terrorists, Perelman's tale of terrorist links deserves a reprise. We will get to that below. The details are complex, which in matters of terrorist financing tends to be part of the point. Complications provide cover. So before we dive into a welter of names and links, let's take a look at how Oil-for-Food was configured and run by the U.N. in ways that left the program wide open not only to the abuses and debaucheries by now well publicized, but also to the funneling of money to terrorists — if Saddam so chose.

And though this avenue remains to be explored, it is at least worth noting that the explosive growth of Oil-for-Food — from a limited program for Iraqi relief introduced in 1996 to a kickback-wracked fiesta of fraud and money-laundering by the late 1990s and beyond — coincided neatly with the period in which al Qaeda really took off. It was in 1998 that Oil-for-Food began to expand and more fully accommodate Saddam's scams. If allegations detailed in a Wall Street Journal story on March 11 prove correct, 1998 was also the year that Saddam may have begun sending oil to a Panamanian front company linked to the head of the program, Benon Sevan. And it was in 1998 that Osama bin Laden issued his fatwa, specifically denouncing U.S. intervention in Iraq and urging Muslims to "Kill the Americans and plunder their money wherever and whenever they can find it."

To be sure, there is no evidence of a causal connection. But there is certainly room to wonder whether Saddam, a master of manipulation, on record as sharing bin Laden's sentiments at least in regard to U.S. involvement in Iraq, would not have been tempted to involve himself in the terrorist boom of the next few years. In principle he was still under sanctions, but Oil-for-Food gave him loopholes through which billions of dollars could pass.

As Oil-for-Food worked in practice, there were two glaring flaws that lent themselves to manipulation by Saddam. One was the U.N. decision to allow Saddam to choose his own buyers of oil and suppliers of goods — an arrangement that Annan himself helped set up during negotiations in Baghdad in the mid-1990s, shortly before he was promoted to Secretary-General. The other problem was the U.N.'s policy of treating Saddam's deals as highly confidential, putting deference to Saddam's privacy above the public's right to know. Even the Iraqi people were denied access to the most basic information about the deals that were in theory being done in their name. The identities of the contractors, the amounts paid, the quantity and quality of goods, the sums, fees, interest, and precise transactions involved in the BNP Paribas bank accounts — all were kept confidential between Saddam and the U.N.

With Saddam allowed to assemble a secret roster of favorite business partners, the only hope of preserving any integrity under Oil-for-Food was that the U.N. would ferociously monitor every deal, and veto anything remotely suspect. Instead, the Security Council looked for weapons-related goods; the Secretariat looked for ways to expand the program (while collecting its three-percent commission on Saddam's oil sales); and Saddam looked for — and found — ways to pervert the program.

To grasp just how easily the U.N. let Saddam turn Oil-for-Food to his own ends, it helps to see his lists of contractors, which the U.N. kept confidential. Luckily, some lists have leaked, and in paging through the wonderland of Saddam's U.N.-approved clientele, including many hundreds of oil buyers and goods suppliers, what one finds is a vast web of business partners that — had the U.N. followed any reasonable policy of disclosure — should have set off major alarms from beginning to end of the program. Why, for instance, was Saddam allowed to peddle oil (especially under-priced oil — yielding fat profits) to clusters of what were clearly middlemen in such financial hideouts as Cyprus, Liechtenstein, and Panama? Was it wise to let him kick off the program by including among the first 50 or so oil buyers a full dozen based in Switzerland? Did nobody at the U.N. wonder about his choice of business partners — such as a holding company in the Seychelles; the Burmese state lumber enterprise; and the Center for Joint Projects at the executive committee of the Belarus-Russia Union?

On the suppliers' list, the entries are no less intriguing. To take just one typical example: On the vague and generic lists provided by the U.N. to the public, you can see that Saddam bought both milk and oil-industry equipment from Russia. Once you see the in-house spreadsheet, however, what emerges is that Saddam bought not only oil equipment, but more than $5 million worth of milk from a Russian state oil company, Zarubezhneft. What look like diverse suppliers in various countries in some cases track back to fronts elsewhere, or to parent companies that in the graft-rich environment of Oil-for-Food clearly had enough of an inside track with Saddam to garner hundreds of millions worth of business — hidden at least to some extent from both their competitors and the wider public, which was asked to trust the U.N.

In other words, Saddam did pretty much what he wanted, and the U.N. role seems to have consisted largely of occupying one more slot — and not a terribly vigilant one — on his patronage payroll.

AIDING AL QAEDA?
Which brings us to back to terrorist ties, and Perelman's story of June 20, 2003, for which the reporting checks out. In brief (hang on for the ride): One link ran from a U.N.-approved buyer of Saddam's oil, Galp International Trading Corp., involved near the very start of the program, to a shell company called ASAT Trust in Liechtenstein, linked to a bank in the Bahamas, Bank Al Taqwa. Both ASAT Trust and Bank Al Taqwa were designated on the U.N.'s own terror-watch list, shortly after 9/11, as entities "belonging to or affiliated with Al Qaeda." This Liechtenstein trust and Bahamian bank were linked to two closely connected terrorist financiers, Youssef Nada and Idris Ahmed Nasreddin — both of whom were described in 2002 by Treasury as "part of an extensive financial network providing support to Al Qaeda and other terrorist related organizations," and both of whom appear on the U.N.'s list of individuals belonging to or affiliated with al Qaeda.

The other tie between Oil-for-Food and al Qaeda, noted by Perelman, ran through another of Saddam's handpicked, Oil-for-Food oil buyers, Swiss-based Delta Services — which bought oil from Saddam in 2000 and 2001, at the height of Saddam's scam for grafting money out of Oil-for-Food by way of under-priced oil contracts. Now shut down, Delta Services was a subsidiary of a Saudi Arabian firm, Delta Oil, which had close ties to the Taliban during Osama bin Laden's heyday in Afghanistan in the late 1990s. In discussions of graft via Oil-for-Food, it has been assumed that the windfall profits were largely kicked back to Saddam, or perhaps used to sway prominent politicians and buy commercial lobbying clout. But that begs further inquiry. There was every opportunity here for Saddam not solely to pocket the plunder, but to send it along to whomever he chose — once he had tapped into the appropriate networks.

Are there other terrorist links? Did Saddam actually send money for terrorist uses through those named by the Forward? Given the more than $100 billion that coursed through Oil-for-Food, it would seem a very good idea to at least try to find out. And while there has been great interest so far in the stunning sums of money involved in this fraud, there has been rather less focus on the potential terrorist connections. While Treasury has been ransacking the planet for Saddam's plunder, there is, as far as I have been able to discover, no investigation so far in motion, or even in the making, focused specifically on terrorist ties in those U.N. lists of Saddam's favored partners.

Indeed, the whereabouts of the full U.N. Oil-for-Food records themselves remain, to say the least, confusing. By some official U.N. accounts, they were all turned over to the Coalition Provisional Authority; by others they were not. A U.N. source explained to me last week that some of the records might be in boxes somewhere on Long Island; yet another says they were sent over to the U.S. Mission to the U.N. Especially crucial, one might suppose, would be the bank records, which should show into which accounts, and where, the Oil-for-Food funds were paid. But what is clear is that no one has so far sat down with access to the full records and begun piecing together the labyrinth of Saddam's financing with an eye, specifically, to potential terrorist ties.

If there is a silver lining to all this, it is that those contract lists and bank records could be a treasure trove of information — an insider tour of what Saddam's regime knew about the dark side of global finance. There are plenty of signs that the secret U.N. lists became, in effect, Saddam's little black book (papered over with a blue U.N. label). Though perhaps "little" is not the correct word. The labyrinth was vast. The wisest move by the U.N., the U.S., or any other authority with full access to these records, would be to make them fully public — thus recruiting help from observers worldwide, not least the media, in digging through the hazardous waste left by Oil-for-Food. The issue is not simply how much Saddam pilfered, or even whether he bought up half the governments of Russia and France — but whether, under the U.N. charade of supervision, he availed himself of the huge opportunities to fund carnage under the cover of U.N. sanctions and humanitarian relief. We are way overdue to pick up that trail.

— Claudia Rosett is a senior fellow with the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, and an adjunct fellow with the Hudson Institute.

[nicky g]

I did say correct me if I'm wrong. The accusation (this is from a right-wing website) is that

"Saddam's dictatorship was able to siphon off an estimated $10 billion from the Oil-for-Food program through oil smuggling and systematic thievery, by demanding illegal payments from companies buying Iraqi oil, and through kickbacks from those selling goods to Iraq--all under the noses of U.N. bureaucrats. The members of the U.N. staff administering the program have been accused of gross incompetence, mismanagement, and possible complicity with the Iraqi regime in perpetrating the biggest scandal in U.N. history."

I read an article recently which stated that most of the US$10bn Saddam was alleged to have made came from oil smuggling, not Food-for-oil kickbacks, and that the UN was not mandated to have anything to do with preventing oil smuggling and hence the smuggling could not have been "under the noses of UN bureacurats", as it simply wasn't their job (their job was to administer the oil being sold within the programe, not police what was happening outside it). That's all I know so I guess I shouldn't have stuck my head above the parapet; if there were other things going on within the programme, that's bad.

Regarding the piece:

"It was in 1998 that Oil-for-Food began to expand and more fully accommodate Saddam's scams. If allegations detailed in a Wall Street Journal story on March 11 prove correct, 1998 was also the year that Saddam may have begun sending oil to a Panamanian front company linked to the head of the program, Benon Sevan. And it was in 1998 that Osama bin Laden issued his fatwa, specifically denouncing U.S. intervention in Iraq and urging Muslims to "Kill the Americans and plunder their money wherever and whenever they can find it." To be sure, there is no evidence of a causal connection. But there is certainly room to wonder whether Saddam, a master of manipulation, on record as sharing bin Laden's sentiments at least in regard to U.S. involvement in Iraq, would not have been tempted to involve himself in the terrorist boom of the next few years."

This is pretty pathetic. Pure speculation based on the fact that, er, two things happened in the same year. Hang on, that was the year I started going out with my last girlfriend! There's no evidence of a causal link, but knowing that she knew I was opposed to US policy in Iraq, maybe she was involved in smuggling oil through the Panama canal, er...

"One link ran from a U.N.-approved buyer of Saddam's oil, Galp International Trading Corp., involved near the very start of the program, to a shell company called ASAT Trust in Liechtenstein, linked to a bank in the Bahamas, Bank Al Taqwa."

This might be interesting if she bothered to explain how Galp was linked to these companies. All she says is that the link "ran back." So far pretty meaningless.

"Now shut down, Delta Services was a subsidiary of a Saudi Arabian firm, Delta Oil, which had close ties to the Taliban during Osama bin Laden's heyday in Afghanistan in the late 1990s. In discussions of graft via Oil-for-Food, it has been assumed that the windfall profits were largely kicked back to Saddam, or perhaps used to sway prominent politicians and buy commercial lobbying clout. But that begs further inquiry. There was every opportunity here for Saddam not solely to pocket the plunder, but to send it along to whomever he chose — once he had tapped into the appropriate networks. "

Again pretty thin, mostly speculation. On the Taliban link, numerous Western oil firms and governments were trying to persuade the Taliban to cooperate on gas and oil pipelines at the time. Unocal flew prominent Taliban leaders to the States to discuss the project. At that time it was, rightly or wrongly, not regarded as particularly illegitimate to have energy-related business links with Afghanistan. It would hardly be surprising that a Saudi oil firm would have such connections.

[nicky g]

This isn't the article I read but it makes similar points:

Two separate scandals have been rolled into one: smuggling and bill padding... The General Accounting Office (GAO) of the U.S. Congress has estimated that the Saddam regime got 10.1 billion dollars in illegal revenues from the OFFP. In fact, 5.7 billion dollars of that came from oil smuggled out in violation of U.N. sanctions during and before the OFFP.

U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan has pointed out that there was a maritime task force, which included U.S. Navy ships, that was responsible for stopping oil smuggling. The Iraqis "were driving trucks through northern Iraq to Turkey. The United States and the British had planes in the air. We were not there. Why is all this being dumped on the United Nations?"

So more than half of the alleged ten billion Saddam made out of "the oil for food programme" had nothing to do with it.

Some other points the writer makes:

" some of the allegations are proven, in the distribution of responsibility, what should be the respective blame on the Secretariat and the Security Council of the United Nations? In an analogous situation in national governments, how would we apportion blame between bureaucrats and ministers? "

"the remaining 4.4 billion dollars of the GAO's estimate of 10.1 billion dollars can be accounted for in two ways: underpricing Iraqi oil and overpricing goods purchased in return. Middlemen colluding with the twin schemes were bribed, the regime kept most of the price differentials in both sets of transactions, and the United Nations as an institution got less in its accounts than it should have. U.N. overseers in the Office of the Iraq Program raised concerns about price discrepancies and apparent surcharges in oil sales to the Sanctions Committee of the Security Council in November 2000. That committee, which includes all 15 members of the Security Council, decided whether to approve contracts.

The United States and Britain acted in March 2001 on concerns raised by the U.N. officials and put on hold thousands of contracts. These related mainly to concerns about dual-use technologies, not price padding, bribes and kickbacks. Not a single one of the 36,000 contracts was ever canceled.

The questions of why no contracts were canceled, and why oil sales were authorized to companies in petroleum-soaked countries like the United Arab Emirates, should be directed to that committee and the Security Council, not to Annan."

Don't prejudge U.N. over Iraq oil-for-food scandal (http://www.iraq.net/displayarticle3405.html)

Thoughts?

[superleeds]

[ QUOTE ]
Of course you leave out the number of civilians saved from Saddam's murder/torture machine--as you always do, in your propagandist, one-sided arithmetic of lives.

[/ QUOTE ]

MMMMMM, this is a favorite of yours and governments thru the ages. If this administration that you support (or any previous administration for that matter), had any consistancy here then it might be a valid arguement. The fact that this and previous US governments not only allow, with zero critizism, but in some cases actively support regimes similar to SH's shows how stupid they think the general public are.

Unfortunately they are right.

[MMMMMM]

To whatever degree you may be right, Superleeds, it is an irrelevant argument in the present context, because the issue is the suffering or liberation of the Iraqi people, not U.S. motives.

The actual victims of Saddam don't care what the liberators' motives are; only that their suffering be lifted. And of course those murdered by Saddam would say the same, if they could.

Saddam "disappeared" around 200,000 Iraqis over the years--never to be heard from again. Whether these individuals died slowly or quickly is anybody's guess. So Alger's argument is hollow, and 200,000 Iraqis "disappeared" by Saddam is far more than the 10,000 killed in the war. And that isn't counting the mass murders, either--just the political arrests and executions.

[nicky g]

"So Alger's argument is hollow, and 200,000 Iraqis "disappeared" by Saddam is far more than the 10,000 killed in the war. And that isn't counting the mass murders, either--just the political arrests and executions."

I don't think this is right. From what remember, the vast majority of the hundreds of thousands that died in Iraq were largely victims of the Anfal campaign against the Kurds and the repression of the Marsh Arabs and Shia uprising. Many political opponents died/disappeared but I don't think it was anywhere near as many as these atrocities. If anyone has any links or info please post.

[MMMMMM]

This article should refute Alger's one-sided arithmetic as well as provide insight into the true horrors of Saddam's regime. Alger claims that the number of people Saddam would have killed, if left in power, "must be considered zero or negligible". However, fully aside from the well-known mass murders, Saddam had hunderds of thousands of Iraqis arbitrarily arrested and "disappeared". I recall reading similar numbers on a site like Human Rights Watch (may have been HRW, in fact) and posting them on this board. So Alger's argument and ballyhooing the 10,000 Iraqis killed by this war to get rid of Saddam doesn't hold water, because even if Saddam never committed mass murder again, he would still keep "disappearing" political opponents. It is conceivable his rate for doing this may even have approached 10,000 per year on average, as I have read estimates of the "disappeared" as being over 200,000. Anyway, here's the article.



How Many People Has Saddam Killed?

By John F. Burns
The New York Times | January 27, 2003


"In the unlit blackness of an October night, it took a flashlight to pick them out: rust-colored butchers' hooks, 20 or more, each four or five feet long, aligned in rows along the ceiling of a large hangar-like building. In the grimmest fortress in Iraq's gulag, on the desert floor 20 miles west of Baghdad, this appeared to be the grimmest corner of all, the place of mass hangings that have been a documented part of life under Saddam Hussein.

At one end of the building at Abu Ghraib prison, a whipping wind gusted through open doors. At the far end, the flashlight picked out a windowed space that appeared to function as a control room. Baggy trousers of the kind worn by many Iraqi men were scattered at the edges of the concrete floor. Some were soiled, as if worn in the last, humiliating moments of a condemned man's life.

The United States is facing a new turning point in its plans to go to war to topple Mr. Hussein, with additional American troops heading for the Persian Gulf, while France and Germany lead the international opposition. But the pressure President Bush has applied already has created chances to peer into the darkest recesses of Iraqi life.

In the past two months, United Nations weapons inspections, mandated by American insistence that Mr. Hussein's pursuit of banned weapons be halted, have ranged widely across the country. But before this became the international community's only goal, Mr. Bush was also attacking Mr. Hussein as a murdering tyrant. It was this accusation that led the Iraqi leader to virtually empty his prisons on Oct. 20, giving Western reporters, admitted that day to Abu Ghraib, a first-hand glimpse of the slaughterhouse the country has become.

In the end, if an American-led invasion ousts Mr. Hussein, and especially if an attack is launched without convincing proof that Iraq is still harboring forbidden arms, history may judge that the stronger case was the one that needed no inspectors to confirm: that Saddam Hussein, in his 23 years in power, plunged this country into a bloodbath of medieval proportions, and exported some of that terror to his neighbors.

Reporters who were swept along with tens of thousands of near-hysterical Iraqis through Abu Ghraib's high steel gates were there because Mr. Hussein, stung by Mr. Bush's condemnation, had declared an amnesty for tens of thousands of prisoners, including many who had served long sentences for political crimes. Afterward, it emerged that little of long-term significance had changed that day. Within a month, Iraqis began to speak of wide-scale re-arrests, and officials were whispering that Abu Ghraib, which had held at least 20,000 prisoners, was filling up again.

Like other dictators who wrote bloody chapters in 20th-century history, Mr. Hussein was primed for violence by early childhood. Born into the murderous clan culture of a village that lived off piracy on the Tigris River, he was harshly beaten by a brutal stepfather. In 1959, at age 22, he made his start in politics as one of the gunmen who botched an attempt to assassinate Iraq's first military ruler, Abdel Karim Kassem.

Since then, Mr. Hussein's has been a tale of terror that scholars have compared to that of Stalin, whom the Iraqi leader is said to revere, even if his own brutalities have played out on a small scale. Stalin killed 20 million of his own people, historians have concluded. Even on a proportional basis, his crimes far surpass Mr. Hussein's, but figures of a million dead Iraqis, in war and through terror, may not be far from the mark, in a country of 22 million people.

Where the comparison seems closest is in the regime's mercilessly sadistic character. Iraq has its gulag of prisons, dungeons and torture chambers — some of them acknowledged, like Abu Ghraib, and as many more disguised as hotels, sports centers and other innocent-sounding places. It has its overlapping secret-police agencies, and its culture of betrayal, with family members denouncing each other, and offices and factories becoming hives of perfidy.

"Enemies of the state" are eliminated, and their spouses, adult children and even cousins are often tortured and killed along with them.

Mr. Hussein even uses Stalinist maxims, including what an Iraqi defector identified as one of the dictator's favorites: "If there is a person, then there is a problem. If there is no person, then there is no problem."

There are rituals to make the end as terrible as possible, not only for the victims but for those who survive. After seizing power in July 1979, Mr. Hussein handed weapons to surviving members of the ruling elite, then joined them in personally executing 22 comrades who had dared to oppose his ascent.

The terror is self-compounding, with the state's power reinforced by stories that relatives of the victims pale to tell — of fingernail-extracting, eye-gouging, genital-shocking and bucket-drowning. Secret police rape prisoners' wives and daughters to force confessions and denunciations. There are assassinations, in Iraq and abroad, and, ultimately, the gallows, the firing squads and the pistol shots to the head.

DOING the arithmetic is an imprecise venture. The largest number of deaths attributable to Mr. Hussein's regime resulted from the war between Iraq and Iran between 1980 and 1988, which was launched by Mr. Hussein. Iraq says its own toll was 500,000, and Iran's reckoning ranges upward of 300,000. Then there are the casualties in the wake of Iraq's 1990 occupation of Kuwait. Iraq's official toll from American bombing in that war is 100,000 — surely a gross exaggeration — but nobody contests that thousands of Iraqi soldiers and civilians were killed in the American campaign to oust Mr. Hussein's forces from Kuwait. In addition, 1,000 Kuwaitis died during the fighting and occupation in their country.

Casualties from Iraq's gulag are harder to estimate. Accounts collected by Western human rights groups from Iraqi émigrés and defectors have suggested that the number of those who have "disappeared" into the hands of the secret police, never to be heard from again, could be 200,000. As long as Mr. Hussein remains in power, figures like these will be uncheckable, but the huge toll is palpable nonetheless.

Just as in Stalin's Russia, the machinery of death is mostly invisible, except for the effects it works on those brushed by it — in the loss of relatives and friends, and in the universal terror that others have of falling into the abyss. If anybody wants to know what terror looks like, its face is visible every day on every street of Iraq.

"Minders," the men who watch visiting reporters day and night, are supposedly drawn from among the regime's harder men. But even they break down, hands shaking, eyes brimming, voices desperate, when reporters ask ordinary Iraqis edgy questions about Mr. Hussein.

"You have killed me, and killed my family," one minder said after a photographer for The New York Times made unauthorized photographs of an exhibition of statues of the Iraqi dictator during a November visit to Baghdad's College of Fine Arts. In recent years, the inexorable nature of Iraq's horrors have been demonstrated by new campaigns bearing the special hallmark of Mr. Hussein. In 1999, a complaint about prison overcrowding led to an instruction from the Iraqi leader for a "prison cleansing" drive. This resulted, according to human rights groups, in hundreds, and possibly thousands, of executions.

Using a satanic arithmetic, prison governors worked out how many prisoners would have to be hanged to bring the numbers down to stipulated levels, even taking into account the time remaining in the inmates' sentences. As 20 and 30 prisoners at a time were executed at Abu Ghraib and elsewhere, warders trailed through cities like Baghdad, "selling" exemption from execution to shocked families, according to people in Iraq who said they had spoken to relatives of those involved. Bribes of money, furniture, cars and even property titles brought only temporary stays.

More recently, according to Iraqis who fled to Jordan and other neighboring countries, scores of women have been executed under a new twist in a "return to faith" campaign proclaimed by Mr. Hussein. Aimed at bolstering his support across the Islamic world, the campaign led early on to a ban on drinking alcohol in public. Then, some time in the last two years, it widened to include the public killing of accused prostitutes.

Often, the executions have been carried out by the Fedayeen Saddam, a paramilitary group headed by Mr. Hussein's oldest son, 38-year-old Uday. These men, masked and clad in black, make the women kneel in busy city squares, along crowded sidewalks, or in neighborhood plots, then behead them with swords. The families of some victims have claimed they were innocent of any crime save that of criticizing Mr. Hussein."

[MMMMMM]

It's right, nicky. The Anfal campaign was of course huge and visible, though. I've seen the figures from groups like HRW and posted them before with links. I don't have them at hand except in the New York Times article I just posted, which only mentions the figures in passing.

[nicky g]

The NYT article doesn't mention the Anfal, Shia uprising or Marsh Arab campaigns at all. I would imagine that it therefore must be including these in its 200,000 "disappeared" figure.

[superleeds]

[ QUOTE ]
because the issue is the suffering or liberation of the Iraqi people

[/ QUOTE ]

But this is not why the US went to war with Iraq. It's being used as an excuse since the origional reasons were false.

[MMMMMM]

"The Oil-for-Food Scandal
The program was corrupt. The U.N. owes the Iraqis--and Congress--an explanation.

BY THERESE RAPHAEL
Thursday, March 11, 2004 12:01 a.m. EST

"If there is evidence, we would investigate it very seriously," Kofi Annan insisted last month when presented with allegations that U.N. officials knew about and may have benefited from Saddam Hussein's corruption of the U.N.'s Oil-for-Food Program. Fortunately, Saddam appears to have been a stickler for record-keeping.

A letter has come to The Wall Street Journal supporting allegations that among those favored by Saddam with gifts of oil was Benon Sevan, director of the U.N.'s Oil-for-Food Program. As detailed on this page on Feb. 9, Mr. Sevan's name appears on a list of individuals, companies and organizations that allegedly received oil allocations or vouchers from Saddam that could then be sold via middlemen for a significant markup. The list, compiled in Arabic from documents uncovered in Iraq's oil ministry, included many of Saddam's nearest and dearest from some 50 countries, including the PLO, pro-Saddam British MP George Galloway, and French politician Charles Pasqua. (Messrs. Galloway and Pasqua have denied receiving anything from Saddam.) According to the list, first published by the Iraqi daily Al Mada in January, Mr. Sevan was another beneficiary, via a company in Panama known as Africa Middle East Petroleum, Co. Ltd. (AMEP), about which we have learned quite a bit.

Mr. Sevan, through a U.N. spokesperson, has also denied the allegation. But the letter, which two separate sources familiar with its origins say was recovered from Iraqi Oil Ministry files, raises new questions about Mr. Sevan's relationship with Iraqi authorities.

The letter is dated Aug. 10, 1998, and addressed to Iraq's oil minister. It states: "Mr. Muwafaq Ayoub of the Iraqi mission in New York informed us by telephone that the above-mentioned company has been recommended by his excellency Mr. Sevan, director of the Iraqi program at the U.N., during his recent trip to Baghdad." The matter is then recommended "for your consideration and proportioning" and the letter is signed Saddam Zain Hassan, executive manager of the State Oil Marketing Organization (SOMO), the Iraqi state-owned company responsible for negotiating oil sales with foreign buyers. A handwritten note below the signature confirms the request was granted "by his excellency the Vice President of the Republic [presumably Taha Yassin Ramadan, now in U.S. custody] in a meeting of the Command Council on the morning of Aug. 15, 1998." Scrawled below that to one side is another note stating that 1.8 million barrels were allocated to the company two days later, on Aug. 17.

A second document shown to the Journal is a chart in Arabic with the heading "Quantity of Oil Allocated and Given to Mr. Benon Sevan." The Oil-for-Food program was divided into 13 phases in all, representing roughly six-month periods from December 1996 through June 2003. Under phase four (during which the letter was written), the chart shows 1.8 million barrels as having been allocated to Mr. Sevan and 1,826 million barrels "executed." In some phases the chart indicates that an oil allocation was approved but no contract was executed for some reason, so that the total allocation awarded to Mr. Sevan in phases four through 13 is 14.2 million barrels, of which 7.291 million were actually disbursed, according to the document.

Mr. Sevan could not be reached for comment on the letter, but did issue a denial in response to our Feb. 9 article. "There is absolutely no substance to the allegations . . . that I had received oil or oil monies from the former Iraqi regime," he said through a spokesman. "Those making the allegations should come forward and provide the necessary documentary evidence." The denial notwithstanding, the documents raise enough questions to warrant an investigation by the U.N., as well as by outside investigators, including the U.S. Congress. (A U.N. spokesman said yesterday that Mr. Sevan is on extended vacation until late April, after which he retires at the month's end.)

Africa Middle East Petroleum Co. Ltd., which is cited in the letter, is registered in Panama and was also approved by the U.N. to buy Iraqi oil under Oil-for-Food. While Panama registration documents list only Panamanian nominees as directors, the Journal has established that AMEP is owned and managed by Fakhry Abdelnour, a Geneva-based oil trader with superb connections in Egypt. The company was registered in the U.K. in the '80s and dissolved in 1992. Mr. Abdelnour's name does not appear on British registration documents, but his brother's and mother's, Munir Abdelnour and Ehtedal Amin Ghali, do.

In a phone conversation, Munir Abdelnour, leader of the Wafd opposition party in Egypt's parliament and a prominent businessman, said he has nothing to do with the company, despite his name appearing as a director of the now-defunct U.K.-registered company. "Africa Middle East Petroleum is a company owned and managed by my brother. He might have used my name, but I have absolutely no clue."

Fakhry Abelnour (whose wife is Panamanian and related to Panama's president) has close ties to Egypt's oil minister. He comes from a prominent Coptic family that is related to that of Boutros Boutros-Ghali, Mr. Annan's immediate predecessor, and Mr. Sevan's former boss when the latter was U.N. envoy in Afghanistan.

Mr. Abdelnour played a key role in the early '90s in helping South Africa circumvent U.N. sanctions to buy Egyptian crude, through AMEP and a subsidiary, now dissolved, called Interstate Petroleum Company. In 1999, South Africa conducted an investigation into allegations of impropriety surrounding margins paid by South Africa's state-run purchaser, the Strategic Fuel Fund Association (whose job was to find suppliers willing to sell crude oil to South Africa) to Mr. Abdelnour's company for his services in sanctions-busting. The 255-page report submitted to parliament in December 1999 by an independent official appointed to investigate the complaint details Mr. Abdelnour's high-level connections in Egypt and the meetings arranged by him between SFF officials and Egyptian oil ministers and officials from the Egyptian General Petroleum Corporation (EGPC), responsible for negotiating sales of Egyptian oil. "Mr Fakhry Abdelnour and his companies' involvement directly or indirectly in the South African oil procurement scenario is a fact that need not be debated. . . . I have already accepted earlier on that AMEP, Interstate and Mr. Abdelnour refer to one and the same person," states the report.

Mr. Abdelnour confirmed he owns the Panama-registered AMEP. "We have been very active in the Middle East for 25 years. We were almost the extended arm of the Egyptian General Petroleum Corporation; we were controlling most of the exports in Egypt," he says. He confirmed that AMEP purchased oil from Iraq through Oil-for-Food, beginning around 1998, and said he made semi-annual trips to Baghdad to meet SOMO officials to keep contracts coming. Asked about his relations with Mr. Sevan, he says he met him only once, at an OPEC conference in Vienna, where a relative of Mr. Abdelnour who was also a friend of Mr. Sevan introduced them. They had dinner together at the InterContinental. "It was interesting to know Benon Sevan as he ran the oil-for-food program," says Mr. Abdelnour. But he insists there was no further contact and says he has no idea why a letter showing Mr. Sevan recommended his company to SOMO would be in the files.

Mr. Abdelnour confirms the many reports now in the public domain that SOMO demanded that surcharges on Iraqi oil be paid into Iraqi accounts. "I paid once," he acknowledges. "I was given an account in Jordan and the name of the lady who was in charge of this account." He says the surcharge amounted to 25 cents a barrel. Was it possible that all this happened unbeknownst to the U.N.? "Impossible," he says. "Everybody knew it. The U.N. knew about it. They [SOMO] contacted you over the phone. . . .The call was over a satellite phone, which was tapped, and the head of SOMO talked to me very openly, not through a disguised language."

AMEP still exists on registry documents in Monaco, but Mr. Abdelnour confirmed that the office there on Boulevard Princesse Charlotte closed two years ago. Intriguingly, the same building in Monaco houses another oil company, Toro Energy SAM, whose owner and a key business partner both figure prominently on the Al Mada list: oil industry specialist Cabecadas Rui de Sousa and Frenchman Patrick Maugein. (Mr. Abdelnour says he does not know either man).

Mr. Maugein, a billionaire with close ties to Jacques Chirac, is a longtime associate of the trader and former fugitive Marc Rich, who fled to Europe in 1983 to avoid answering charges of racketeering, illegal trading and dodging a tax-bill of $48 million. (Mr. Rich was pardoned by Bill Clinton in his final hours in the White House). Mr. Maugein was also a close contact of Tariq Aziz, with whom he met regularly. He is the non-executive chairman of Soco International PLC, a publicly listed London-based petroleum exploration/production company, which goes into markets the majors tend to skip--Mongolia, Vietnam, North Korea, Libya and Yemen.

Messrs. Maugein and Rui de Sousa acquired their interest in Soco through an entity called Torobex, whose shares were held by Tobex Holdings Ltd. According to Al Mada, Mr. Maugein allegedly received 25 million barrels of Iraqi crude allocations. Mr. de Sousa is also on the allocation list, down for 11 million barrels.

In a statement provided to the Journal, Mr. Maugein says "there is no truth whatever" to any allegation of impropriety and that his dealings in Iraq "were conducted in a perfectly legal manner and in strict accordance" with U.N. rules. His dealings in Iraq, he suggests, were through his 10% stake in Italiana Energia e Servizi, a Mantua-based oil refinery, which is majority-owned by Mario Contini and purchased crude from Iraq under Oil-for-Food.

On the Al Mada list, Mr. Maugein's name appears next to the name of Dutch-based oil trading company Trafigura (Beheer BV), which has the bulk of its operations in London. In his statement, Mr. Maugein says that "Trafigura's activities in Iraq are completely independent of that of Mr. Maugein and there is no connection at all between Mr. Maugein and the incident in 2001 involving Trafigura." The incident is the Essex oil smuggling scandal, on which the Journal carried an investigative story in May 2002. In a smuggling practice known as top-loading, 1.8 million barrels approved for sale under a U.N. contract was topped off with an additional 272,000 barrels in the summer of 2001, according to the captain of the Essex oil-tanker, who blew the whistle on the smuggling by advising U.S. and U.N. authorities. It was the second time in less than four months that the Essex had been chartered to carry top-loaded crude.

Trafigura purchased the oil from oil equipment supplier Ibex Energy France, which in turn bought it from SOMO in Iraq. Ibex said the scheme had been cooked up by Trafigura; Trafigura claimed Ibex fooled it into believing that it had U.N. permission to purchase all of the oil. A French government investigation into Ibex's involvement in the Essex incident appears to have been dropped in late 2002. Ibex was struck from the U.N.'s list of approved companies to deal in Iraq after the Essex incident and the Security Council's 661 Sanctions Committee, responsible for overseeing oil-for-food, asked eight governments (including the U.S., France, the U.K. and the Netherlands) to investigate, but had not heard back by the time oil-for-food was shut down last November.

Ibex's rise from modest beginnings as a regional company with non-oil commercial dealings to a major petroleum broker is something of a mystery. Its office is at 77 boulevard Champs Elysee in Paris. The building's concierge told us that Ibex and Toro occupy the same penthouse office. A receptionist readily fielded inquiries about both companies, though referred questions on Toro to Mr. de Sousa in Monaco.

"I don't share an office with Ibex. I have nothing to do with them and neither does Mr. Maugein," said Mr. de Sousa in a phone interview. "We know Ibex as we know Shell [Oil]. So they gave you my number. Don't you have the number of the Daily Mail?"

José Antonio Jiménez, a former friend and business partner who has known Mr. Maugein since 1972, sees it differently. "Ibex is a microscopic company used as a screen by Mr. Maugein. He uses Ibex and Toro Energy as screen companies to manage his oil traffic," says Mr. Jimenez. Mr. Jimenez was a minority partner in Compagnie Francaise Internationale de Distribution, which was controlled by Mr. Maugein, but the two had a falling out in the mid '90s over money. "Maugein specialized in outlaw countries--Libya, Algeria, Iraq--using his political contacts," says Mr. Jimenez. "Chirac used to call Patrick Maugein 'my cousin' and recommended him to Saddam Hussein . . . Maugein used to go every year to Baghdad to see Tariq Aziz, but after a while he would just send his brother Philippe [now a consultant for Trafigura] and de Sousa." Mr. Jimenez believes that Ibex's contracts in Iraq came via Mr. Maugein.

Mr. de Sousa says he and Mr. Maugein know Jean-Paul Cayre, the former Rich trader who is Ibex's managing director, but that they have nothing to do with his business in Iraq or elsewhere. Asked if he has any relationship with AMEP, which once shared a building in Monaco, Mr. de Sousa said "I probably did some business with them buying Egyptian crude at the end of the '80s and early '90s. I don't know [Fakhry Abdelnour], but I talked with him on the phone."

Mr. de Sousa believes the Al Mada list "has something to do with the competition between different groups sharing power in Iraq. People are now adjusting accounts between former people linked to the oil business, people who went there. I went [to Iraq] to discuss potential investments. Who didn't go?" The complaints about Saddam's corruption of Oil-for-Food "is a big hypocrisy," he says. If corruption occurred, "in my opinion it was because whoever was sitting at the U.N. Security Council was not doing their job . . . In my view, the whole thing was accepted, admitted by major countries."

As further details of Oil-for-Food unfold, it becomes clearer than ever that the inspectors employed by the U.N. were, at best, lax in monitoring Saddam's get-rich-quick scheme. This is another area begging for investigation.

Inspections under Oil-for-Food, as former U.N. program-officer Michael Soussan indicated in The Wall Street Journal on Monday, amounted to little more than rubber-stamping whatever contract Saddam's regime initialed. On the export side, top-loading of the Essex and other vessels happened on the watch of inspectors from Dutch-based company Saybolt International BV, though no one has alleged publicly that Saybolt's inspectors knew what was going on. Saybolt's name appears on the Al Mada list too. Saybolt has denied it received anything from Saddam.

The import side too was rife with corruption, including kickbacks demanded by Iraq on imported goods, and shameful lack of quality controls on much of the food and medicine entering Iraq. The job of inspecting those goods fell mostly to a Geneva-based company called Cotecna Inspection, SA. In February 1999, the U.N. terminated a five-year contract with Lloyd's Register, which had set up an innovative system in Jordan for inspecting shipments of goods going into Iraq to ensure against sanctions-busting. The contract was put to tender and Cotecna won with the lowest bid. It has had the contract ever since and it was renewed by the Coalition Provisional Authority in November.

And yet the choice of Cotecna should have raised a few eyebrows. The firm's founder and president is the octogenarian Elie Georges Massey, a Coptic emigré who transformed his company from salt-extraction in Iran in the early '70s into one of a handful of players in the rough-and-tumble business of pre-shipment inspection (or PSI). PSI work mostly involves winning contracts in the developing world, where customs authorities are too corrupt or inept to be trusted, to monitor the flow of exports and imports.

Cotecna, known in the industry for the Massey family's superb contacts in the countries in which it does business, has won PSI deals in Iran, Nigeria, Colombia, Ghana, Kenya, Peru and other places. One prominent former employee of Cotecna is Kojo Annan, Kofi Annan's son by his first marriage. The young Mr. Annan was employed by Cotecna in the mid-1990s. He reportedly continued a consultancy relationship with Cotecna through his Nigerian-based company.

Philip Henebry, Cotecna's CFO, confirmed that Kojo Annan had been employed there, but would not confirm any dates. Asked how Cotecna was able to underbid competitors on the Iraq contract by as much as half, he replied that "We felt that the margins with competitors were very, very high. Originally the contract was for short periods and we worked on the assumption it would be renewed."

At the time of the U.N. inspection tender, Cotecna's reputation wasn't exactly stellar. Its CEO, Robert Massey, was indicted by a Swiss magistrate in a bribery and money laundering scandal involving Pakistan's former prime minister, Benazir Bhutto, that rocked the PSI industry. Also indicted were a former employee of Swiss giant and the global PSI leader, Societé Générale de Surveillance (SGS)--which at the time owned a majority stake in Cotecna--and a Geneva-based Bhutto lawyer. Cotecna claimed it was a victim of Pakistani politics. SGS, which was suffering its own management and financial troubles, subsequently sold Cotecna back to the Massey family and itself came under new management which diversified the company away from its reliance on PSI contracts. Cotecna, meanwhile, dusted itself off and went on to win a lucrative U.N. deal. According to Yves Genier, a Swiss journalist from the newspaper l'Agefi who has been looking into Cotecna's role here, the prosecutor's case was dropped for lack of compelling public interest.

There is no doubt that the U.N. relief effort in Iraq has been a global scandal. A monstrous dictator was able to turn the Oil-for-Food program into a cash cow for himself and his inner circle, leaving Iraqis further deprived as he bought influence abroad and acquired the arms and munitions that coalition forces discovered when they invaded Iraq last spring.

A U.N. culture of unaccountability is certainly also to blame. And Security Council members share responsibility for lax oversight, no doubt one reason there is so little appetite for an investigation.

But Saddam's ability to reap billions for himself, his cronies and those who proved useful to him abroad depended on individuals who were his counterparties. These deserve a full investigation if the U.N.'s credibility is to be restored and its role in Iraq and elsewhere trusted. Especially now, with the U.N. taking a more active role in Iraq, it's time we knew more about how the oil-for-food scandal was allowed to happen."

Ms. Raphael is editorial page editor of The Wall Street Journal Europe.

http://www.opinionjournal.com/editorial/feature.html?id=110004801

[MMMMMM]

But the argument I am having with Chris is whether the cost of 10,000 lives was justifiable in terms of how many lives it will save. Given that Saddam "disappeared" around 200,000 Iraqis over the years (that's not counting mass murder campaigns like those against the Kurds or swamp Arabs), the answer should be obvious.

[MMMMMM]

No, not even close, Nicky. The article is specifically talking about disapperarances due to arbitrary arrests and abductions. The total numbers including the swamp Arab campaigns are in the upper hundreds of thousands not the lower. You can look it up but it may be hard unless you get lucky since there is so much other "Iraq" stuff in the search engines. I know I posted this before with the total figues and the breakdown.

[MMMMMM]

Nicky, gas disperses in the area around the shell. Hence it has a wider killing range. Multiply that with an expanded pattern of shelling and you can thoroughly wipe out a much larger area with fewer shells than if all kills must be due to direct physical damage.

And no, I don't see terrorists using such shells, but what's your point?

[nicky g]

I don't have time to read through or get my head round (more the latter) all of this now. If any individuals at the UN were invloved in corruption, that's shameful. After the George Galloway debacle, not to mention Niger uranium documents, one has to be a little suspicious of documentation being "found" in Iraq; hopefully the numerous enquiries into this issue will clear that up. Nevertheless, blaming the entire 10bn Saddam allegedly made off illegal oil trading on the UN is spurious given that at least half of it had nothing to do with the UN programme, and according to the article I linked to the Security Council countries rather than UN bureacucrats were ultimately responsible for vetting the suitability of the companies Saddam was selling to.
Will try to read the whole thing tomorrow.

[MMMMMM]

M:" Every major intelligence service in the world had roughly the same impression about Iraq's WMDs. It wasn't the media's mistake."

[iCA: "No, that's just one of those right-wing lines that you keep repeating without bothering to check the facts. In reality, not a single intelligence agency in the world, including any of ours, had any evidence that Iraq maintained any stockpiles of WMD.[/i]

Well they all had come up with roughly the same assessment. And note how I used the word "impression" but you used the word "evidence" in your fact-twisting response.

Also, it's NOT just a right-wing line; that was the assessment--the impression-- of the major intelligence services. To what degree they had evidence, or good evidence, is another question.

[nicky g]

"No, not even close, Nicky. The article is specifically talking about disapperarances due to arbitrary arrests and abductions."

The article is trying to estimate how many people Saddam killed. If the various campaigns are not included in this figure, where are they? Why would he ignore Saddam's most vicious acts in such an article? The victims of the campaign against the Marsh Arabs certainly do not number in the upper hundreds of thousands.

[nicky g]

" no, I don't see terrorists using such shells, but what's your point?"

The whole premise of the preemptive war was that Saddam might give these weapons to his (non-existent) al-Qaeda allies.

[superleeds]

[ QUOTE ]
Also, it's NOT just a right-wing line; that was the assessment--the impression-- of the major intelligence services.

[/ QUOTE ]

No, it wasn't. (Unless you mean their assesments being that Iraq was not an immediate threat)

[MMMMMM]

The figues are somewhere on HRW or some other such org's website, and made the news some months ago. The problem is it's hard to track down in the search engines becauser they are clogged with so much other Iraq stuff. The numbers of all deaths combined due to Saddam is in the upper hundreds of thousands, if I recall--at least it's over 500,000.

When I ferreted this info. out before and posted it, I remember I spent like 30 minutes searching and reading just to find it. Now unles one gets lucky or uses better search criteria who knows how long it will take. Anyway it's all out there somewhere, broken down, as well as totaled.

[MMMMMM]

Yes, it was. The intelligence services of the US, UK, Germany, Israel, Australia and some others all believed Saddam had WMD/WMD programs. Some years ago German intelligence reported that Saddam would have nuclear weapons by 2005 at the latest, and that report made the news. Hell, even France believed Saddam had WMD/WMD programs, and if I'm not mistaken Chirac even said so. He just wanted to "give inspections time to work" though.

[MMMMMM]

The premise wasn't based solely on the threat of Iraq giving shells, though, Nicky. And it was illegal for Iraq to own any WMDs including such shells, and Saddam had numerous chances to comply with that requirement, which he generally spurned or at best provided halfway-measures.

[nicky g]

"The premise wasn't based solely on the threat of Iraq giving shells, though, Nicky. "

THat's the most the UK intelligence dossier on Iraqi WMDs said he had - battlefield shells.

[nicky g]

"The victims of the campaign against the Marsh Arabs certainly do not number in the upper hundreds of thousands."

Sorry I misread your post; you didn't claim this.

[Chris Alger]

This article answers the question I asked you as follows: "Casualties from Iraq's gulag are harder to estimate." The only huge numbers come from more than a decade ago, before Saddam was put "in the box" (Colin Powell) and unable to reach the Kurds or Marsh Arabs he had so willingly slaughtered before.

For you the assume that Saddam will not only likely but imminently planning a reprise of the 1980's massacres makes no more sense than saying a the U.S. intends to reprise the death toll of the last country it occupied for years, Vietnam.

[MMMMMM]

Er, Chris...I'm not saying that Saddam would have managed a reprise of any of his large-scale massacres. What I am saying is that his chronic regime policy of "disappearing" his political opponents, their family members, anyone he deemed at all a possible threat...that this would have continued, and that the deaths from such Stalinist secret police tactics would almost surely have been more than 10,000 over the next few years or a decade or so (since Saddam's regime "disappeared" about 200,000 Iraqis over the years, which figure does not include those killed in his large-scale massacres). Sorry if I didn't make this clear.

[Cyrus]

...Two years? Five years? The next millenium?

You realize of course that the longer this takes (already one year of complete occupation and unilimited access to premises, people and documents!) the worse the American armed forces come off!

Even worse than the much-maligned UN inspection team...

"Arguing with you is like talking to a brick wall: your mind is already made up."

No, my mind was made up after a reasonable amount of time has elapsed, when the American inspectors themselves testified that there are, in fact, no WMDs in Iraq and when the American administration started whistling Dixie.

Your mind, on the other hand, is stuck in pre-invasion "facts" (such as the poison vials shown by Powell to the Security Council!) and assurances from Washington. Instead of adjusting your position in accordance with new evidence, you search frantically the WorldNetDaily!

Whose is the brick wall here?

[MMMMMM]

Cyrus, I have adjusted my opinion. I think there is a very good possibility that no WMD will be found in Iraq, and I think there is even a possibility that Saddam's WMD programs were all inactive.

I somehow got the impression that you, however, were certain of all of the above. Pardon me if I presumed too much and that is not your position.

As for a goodly length of time...hmmm...let's see...another 24 months and I'd probably be as convinced as you are now.

[Cyrus]

Good post. (I will have it stuffed!)

"As for a goodly length of time...hmmm...let's see...another 24 months and I'd probably be as convinced as you are now."

Although the situations are not equal, they are analogous : When you have a crime scene and you are loking for a key piece of evidence, such as the murder weapon, you kinda give more credibility to the weapon being found sooner (i.e. within a reasonable amount of time) rather than later.

The goosebump-raising scene whereby the wily old detective visits the sealed off apartment some months after the crime took place and within one minute of looking around discovers a startling piece of evidence that escaped the diligent attention of a dozen forensic and search specialists, only happens in movies.

[ACPlayer]

Well, the article is OK.

The author is correct when he says: history may judge that the stronger case was the one that needed no inspectors to confirm: that Saddam Hussein, in his 23 years in power, plunged this country into a bloodbath of medieval proportions, and exported some of that terror to his neighbors.

However, note that he does not say that this is sufficient reason to go to war and kill thousands of innocents ourselve. Hint: it is NOT sufficient reason to go to war.

Note also that he does not say that an American administration deliberating lying to the people (or as you have admitted to their being deceptive) is acceptable behaviour when it comes to risking soldiers, civilians as well as other resources.

Nor, does it say, that the same resources could have been put to better use than to create a bunch of new people who dislike the American population.

Nor, does it say that the administration went into this with any sort of plan other than to throw tons of ammo into Iraq, creating havoc, low level nuclear fallout, and destroying lives.

You are grasping at non-existent straws when you try to justify your and my killing of tens thousands because if we had not done so somebody else would have killed/tortured/raped some unknown numbers of people.

[MMMMMM]

It's not grasping at straws at all.

Saddam basically executed 200,000 political prisoners over a couple decades or so. That's not counting the mass murders of the marsh Arabs, etc.

Saddam could reasonably be expected--make that surely be expected--to continue killing perceived political enemies and their families.

Just because the future numbers are "unknown" diesn't mean they should be much less than his past performance. And they would have to be FAR, FAR less to not exceed the 10,000 Iraqis killed in the war.

So I'm not stretching by saying the numbers of lives saved ought to significantly exceed the numbers of lives lost. The comparison of 200,000 "disappearances" versus 10,000 war deaths is vast. Conversely, you or Alger are stretching if you claim that it shouldn't be expected that lives would be saved by deposing Saddam.

[MMMMMM]

Well, Cyrus, if the "crime scene" is the size of the entire state of California, and tons of nerve gas could easily fit in one person's garage, a search might be expected to take a while. Also, gathering information about WMD programs might be expected to take some time too.

[ACPlayer]

Conversely, you or Alger are stretching if you claim that it shouldn't be expected that lives would be saved by deposing Saddam.

Wrong as usual (I wont speak for any others). This statement may or may not be true (and is certainly not provable) and is completely irrelevant.

First: No body went to war for this reason. If this was the reason we would be at war in most of Africa.

Second: If this had been the reason offered by the government even you would not have supported it at that time. Your support is based on a misguided, ignorant fear of Islam.

Third: It is clearly immoral to justify the killing of tens of thousands of innocents because perhaps somebody else may kill more sometime in the future. By that argument we can justify killing every brown skinned person in the country because perhaps one of them may let off a nuclear device in NYC someday in the future; Or that we should lock up or kill all teenagers because a Columbine type killing may happen again; Or.......

Your logic remains twisted because you will not accept the now obvious fact that the war was wrong, misguided and a waste of our time, money and a waste of thousands of lives.

The war may have been justified if Saddam was a threat to us, it is now obvious that he was not and that the war was unjustified and the behaviour of our government shameful.

[nicky g]

"Saddam basically executed 200,000 political prisoners over a couple decades or so. That's not counting the mass murders of the marsh Arabs, etc."

I still don't think this is right. I've done a fair bit of looking around and I can't find any breakdown, but this Amnesty report for example includes the Anfal victims for example in disappearance" cases (the report doesn't give total numbers for the number of disappearances), and the NYT report must be including them in the "disappearance" cases as there's nowhere else they could be. Until one of us comes up with an authoritative set of figures neither of us is going to be able to convince the other, but nonetheless I still would dispute this.

"Amnesty International has on numerous occasions over the years expressed its concern at the practice of "disappearances" by the Iraqi authorities. Cases have been documented in several reports [2]. The organization has obtained and continues to receive the names of thousands of victims whose fate and whereabouts remain unknown. As an example, according to some estimates over 100,000 Kurdish civilians "disappeared" in 1988 alone, in a space of three to four months, in the so-called Operation Anfal when the Iraqi Government implemented a program of destruction of villages and towns all over Iraqi Kurdistan."

Disappearances": Unresolved cases since the early 1980s (http://web.amnesty.org/library/Index/ENGMDE140051997?open&amp;of=ENG-IRQ#BAC)

[superleeds]

But they all tempered their assesments with caution, i.e. how advanced these programs were and all doubted his ability to deliver such missiles. But none of that mattered to Bush. He just used the bits he wanted and ignored the rest. He and his cohorts wanted this war and sold it to General Public along the lines of 'he not only has weapons, he also has the ability to deliver them to your backyard and not only that he has so many he will give his buddies in Al Queada some'. This was a lie and no intelligence agency in the world ever came close to giving him reason to believe this was so.

You can argue that this ultimately is a case of the means justifying the ends - SH/Sons would have ultimately aquired such weapons and delivery systems and therefore it is better to deal with it now rather than later - but no such arguement is being made by the US government. It is just blaming poor intelligence when in reality Bush &amp; Co just took the bits they wanted to be true and spun it out of all proportion.

[MMMMMM]

If I recall, the administration did not say Saddam "had the means to deliver them" but instead indicated Iraq probably soon would have such means. I do agree that the agenda was pushed by the administration more than was warranted given what we know in hindsight. I don't think that means the administration lied, though. Some spin, yes; but not outright deliberate lies.

[elwoodblues]

It's not a question of what we know in hindsight.

Why would you so casually write off "spin" on a decision to go to war? The fact that the administration spun the intelligence to favor going to war only supports the notion that they were predisposed to going to war with Iraq. The question for me is whether President Bush was looking for evidence to support a conclusion (to go to war with Iraq) or whether he was looking for evidence in order to reach the conclusion. Almost everything I see suggests the former.

[MMMMMM]

The reasons we went to war are not the issue being discussed in this sub-thread.

You are fallaciously playing down the threat of future murders by Saddam. The examples you propose are contrived, absurd and inappropriate. Future murders by Saddam would be expected not only to be virtually certain, but, based on past performance, to substantially exceed 10,000 over some years. A rational approach acknowledges this, whereas you are just speaking in fuzzy blanket fashion.

There is a moral imperative to remove any despot who has been in the process of killing hundreds of thousands of his own citizens, and is continuing to kil--if such removal can be effected for only 10,000 war casualties. That we cannot follow through on this moral imperative everywhere it is called for, does not mean we should not follow through on it anywhere. Fortunately for the people of Iraq, this moral imperative coincided with our strategic interest. Thus their people have been relieved of a despot who would surely have killed many more than 10,000 Iraqis, and would have continued to terrorize the country, for many years to come.

To argue otherwise is illogical and/or morally blind.

[MMMMMM]

Well Nicky I'll poke around a little today and see if I can find it. Maybe I am wrong somewhat but if so I doubt I am recalling it vastly incorrectly. Also, even should I be recalling the breakdoiwn incorrectly, the total numbers killed by Saddam are over 500,000 and the number of political "disappearances" is way, way over 10,000 (the number of Iraqi casualties in the war). So as long as that number is far higher I think my argument still holds water.

[MMMMMM]

"Why would you so casually write off "spin" on a decision to go to war?"

Because I think the spin was mild compared to what were presumed facts at the time.

Also, I think the war was justified even if Saddam's weapons were no more than we have found. If nothing else, the humanitarian case for war was exceedingly strong, and there was also no doubt Saddam was an enemy, and Iraq is a strategic location.

[nicky g]

"total numbers killed by Saddam are over 500,000 "

Most of the estimates for total numbers (not including wars) were 200,000-300,000.

"the number of political "disappearances" is way, way over 10,000 "

Possibly. I genuinely don't know.

"as long as that number is far higher I think my argument still holds water. "

Depends how much higher. On would have to assume the regime would have been in power for a a good deal longer. Also depends how the situation pans out.

[superleeds]

[ QUOTE ]
Because I think the spin was mild compared to what were presumed facts at the time.

[/ QUOTE ]

Presumed by who? Not the major Intelligence agencies although that is who the American and British public were led to believe presumed such a thing. IMHO this is not mild spin, it's lying.

[ QUOTE ]
Also, I think the war was justified even if Saddam's weapons were no more than we have found. If nothing else, the humanitarian case for war was exceedingly strong, and there was also no doubt Saddam was an enemy

[/ QUOTE ]

As I've posted before, this may be reasonable if the US had a history of it. Using it now is just hypocritical Bull$hit and a desperate act to legitamize and hide the real reason the US (as all countries do) acts the way it does.

[ QUOTE ]
and Iraq is a strategic location

[/ QUOTE ]

Bingo. (And of course a war is always good news for the weapons and logistics industries).

[MMMMMM]

My impression is that pre-war, major intelligence services more or less agreed on the matter. And I recall reading the report of German intelligemnce perhaps 4 or years ago which said Saddam would have nukes by 2005 at the latest.

As for US motives, to me that doesn't impact the humanitarian imperative. If we only act where there exists a humanitartian imperative AND we have strategic interests, we in SOME instances. On this issue the humanitarian need exists regardless of our motives, and therefore I am glad to see us doing some good for some oppressed peoples even if doing good is not the primary reason we are effecting a good work.

[superleeds]

[ QUOTE ]
My impression is that pre-war, major intelligence services more or less agreed on the matter. And I recall reading the report of German intelligemnce perhaps 4 or years ago which said Saddam would have nukes by 2005 at the latest.

[/ QUOTE ]

Pre-war my impression was similar to yours but as the $hit has hit the fan it appears we have been hoodwinked by a government that was hell bent on war. As for the German intelligence I have no knowledge so my only comment would be was this just a lone voice or a selected piece of information taken for properganda purposes.

[ QUOTE ]
As for US motives, to me that doesn't impact the humanitarian imperative.

[/ QUOTE ]

Ok. I see cynical hyprocracy. And you see a happy by-product.



[ QUOTE ]
If we only act where there exists a humanitartian imperative AND we have strategic interests, we in SOME instances

[/ QUOTE ]

I don't understand what you are trying to say here.

[ QUOTE ]
On this issue the humanitarian need exists regardless of our motives, and therefore I am glad to see us doing some good for some oppressed peoples even if doing good is not the primary reason we are effecting a good work

[/ QUOTE ]

I don't agree that the US is doing good work. Ultimately I believe 'this crusade of Dubya's' will increase the terrorist population and the overall tension in the world. Only time will tell and hopefully you will have the last word.

[MMMMMM]

[ QUOTE ]
"If we only act where there exists a humanitartian imperative AND we have strategic interests, we in SOME instances"



"I don't understand what you are trying to say here."

[/ QUOTE ]

I left out a few words somehow. I meant something like this: "If we only act where there exists a humanitarian imperative AND we have strategic interests, we are at least in SOME instances doing humanitarian good". Also, it is unavoidable that we only act in certain instances where humanitarian needs exist, because the costs of such actions sare high and we do not have unlimited resources. Since there are strategic reasons for the Iraq war as well, those strategic reasons in essence reduce the net costs of the operation since we are attaining something (hopefully) that is in our interests. So call it cynical if you wish, but I think it is just more realistic, unfortunately.

As for "time will tell", I agree.

[ACPlayer]

Iraq is a strategic location

Buried in a sea of idiotic writing is the real reason you support the war. The location is strategic for you because:

1. It furthers your holy crusade (could I call it perhaps Jihad) against Islam. You like it because you see Iran, Syria as the next targets (note that neither of these are a threat to the US, just part of the crusade).

2. It may help control over oil.

Perhaps you too have a pro-Israel agenda. I suspect you only support Israel because they are happily murdering Muslims for you. Once the muslims are gone, you would be happy killing off the Jews - they did of course kill Christ.

All this talk of humanitarian considerations is balm for conscience. Happy talk, poppy cock.

[ACPlayer]

We were discussing how WMD has not been found and this was the main reason proffered for going to war.

The examples directly follow from your argument that it is moral and necessary to certainly kill innocents to avoid possible future deaths. If this is the Christian morality you are so proud of then you can shove it you know where.

Should we be going to war in most of Africa? Should we takeover Zimbabwe, invade Sudan? Perhaps invade Russia to rescue the Chechens?

You are either a fool or completely ammoral. Your choice.

[MMMMMM]

I suppose it is par for the course that you would refer to succint, logical answers as "idiotic writings".

Iran and Syria are the two greatest material sponsors of anti-Western terrorism in the world today. Saudi Arabia is the greatest ideological sponsor of terrorism.

As for the rest of your post, how very mistaken you are about my beliefs or motives.

[MMMMMM]

So you favor leaving despots to murder their own people at will, and in great numbers, because you don't believe any innocent lives should be sacrificed to stop future greater carnage, to resist tyranny, to free a people. I suppose you would even think--in order to be consistent, of course--that it would have been immoral for the Iraqi people themselves to foment a revolution to depose Saddam, because that unavoidably would have involved some innocents dying as well--doubtless more than died in the Iraq war as we prosecuted it.

If we could effectively, and affordably, remove the despots of the other countries you mention, and occupy them until they could become free democracies (as we occupied Germany and Japan), that would be a great thing. Unfortunately, we do not have such limitless resources or unlimited manpower, so most of those people will simply have to suffer and die under the heel of their tyrannical leaders and backwards political systems.

Despotism is perhaps the single greatest cause of evil and suffering throughout the ages of humanity: it has likely caused more misery than anything else in the human condition.

But you, ACPlayer, do not believe in removing despots, because that must generally occasion some innocent deaths; yet you ignore the far greater number of innocent deaths that the despot himself inflicts. You ignore the insidious daily suffering of those oppressed, the fear of the secret police and the terror in the middle of the night at the knock on the door. But ignoring it does not make it go away; it still exists, far away from ACPlayer, but very, very real. And the ghosts of all those slain by the tyrant Saddam--hundreds of thousands strong--would be crying out, if they could, for the war that just happened: asking for some greater power to come and relieve their sons and daughters and cousins from the evil Butcher of Baghdad. But you cannot hear those voices, ACPlayer...because you are not really listening. If you try, really try: someday you will hear them.

[ACPlayer]

I suppose it is par for the course that you would refer to succint, logical answers as "idiotic writings

A cynic thinks he is a realist. An idiot thinks he is being succint.

Iran and Syria are the two greatest material sponsors of anti-Western terrorism in the world today. Saudi Arabia is the greatest ideological sponsor of terrorism.

I deliberately did not mention the Bush's friends in Saudi Arabia. Iran and Syria are no threat to the US, if left alone. They are a threat to Israel.

As for the rest of your post, how very mistaken you are about my beliefs or motives.

I understand you very well. I have met with other religious bigots before.

[ACPlayer]

I bet you feel really good and clean now. Your conscience is saved because you have done some real good.

India freed it self from the despotic british (refer to for example the Jalianwalla Bagh massacre); South Africa got rid of the Smuts and the Malans (refer to the Apartheid); both without the help of the moralists from America. In both cases they now have vibrant democracies.

On the other hand, we helped the South Vietnamese against the communists monsters; we helped the Iranians by giving them the Shah; we helped the Taliban against the Russians; and now we are helping the Iraqi's. Now, we have a Socialist Vietnam, a theocratic Iran, and an Afghanistan run by war lords with a puppet mayor of Kabul. And of course we have a "liberated" Iraq with the average citizen (bear)hugging our troops and greeting them with open (fire)arms.

Which of these two paths will bring a country into the world of self determination?

History has seen its share of despots and will have its share of despots. Iraq was not even the most violent place on the planet in 2003 (refer to Rwanda, The Congo, Mozambique, Liberia, Algeria, Chechnya, etc).

Your argument holds no water in the historical context.

Your argument is morally bankrupt, knowingly sanctioning the killing of thousands without exploring alternatives. Using this flimsy argument to cover the purely selfish monetary and religious reasons you have for the killings of innocent men, women and children.

Look in the mirror for the face of the terrorist!

[MMMMMM]

I'm not very religious and I'm no bigot. I only abhor bigotry-- and especially, institutionalized bigotry.

[MMMMMM]

To follow where your argument ineluctably leads: if Hitler had not invaded other countries, the Nazis should have been left alone to do whatever the hell they wanted to their own people, because any attempt to forcibly resist or depose Hitler would inevitably have cost some innocent lives.

If that isn't a stupid and immoral argument, I don't know what is.

[ACPlayer]

I dont know what you are. Your writings indicate that you are a bigot. Fortunately, for the most part you are only fooling yourself as can be seen by most threads you participate in.

[ACPlayer]

As I recall, nobody did anything about Hitler until after he invaded Poland. Even then the US at least stayed on the side lines until it was directly threatened. Also the vast majority of the German population supported Hitler, so there was nothing to liberate in Germany. If someone had attacked Hitler, he would have been attacking a country who's population (other than the hapless Jews) did not want to be liberated.

Understand this central freedom issue and you will move forward in your thinking: The right to self determination for a people comes from fighting for it.

If Iraqi's want freedom and self determination they should fight for it. Note that now they are beginning to fight for it -- against us. The American force is just as ruthless (and better equipped) as Saddam in putting down any voices of dissent, the Iraqi's are fighting us, when they did not fight Saddam. Hmmmmm.

[Kenrick]

[ QUOTE ]

Should we be going to war in most of Africa? Should we takeover Zimbabwe, invade Sudan? Perhaps invade Russia to rescue the Chechens?


[/ QUOTE ]

I'd wager the world would be a safer place if we took over the entire Middle East.

Anyone still arguing about WMD's, remember even Bill Clinton thought they were there at the time of the invasion. And the United Nations may want to pretend otherwise, but it thought Iraq had WMD's, too.

Iraq disregarded pretty much every U.N. resolution for the past TEN YEARS. What did you think was going to happen?

As for why Saddam didn't use chemical weapons during Desert Storm, it was widely known that if he used chemical weapons the U.S. would use nuclear weapons.

You guys sure do make a lot of excuses for someone who ran rape camps and killed people at the drop of a hat.

[ACPlayer]

I'd wager the world would be a safer place if we took over the entire Middle East.

And the Iranian Mullah says:

I'd wager the world would be a safer place if we took over the entire world.

Iraq disregarded pretty much every U.N. resolution for the past TEN YEARS. What did you think was going to happen?

Iraq is not the first country to disregard UN resolution. There is one country that has disregarded them for at least 40 years. Any ideas?

[MMMMMM]

"I dont know what you are. Your writings indicate that you are a bigot. Fortunately, for the most part you are only fooling yourself as can be seen by most threads you participate in."

Your interpretation of my writings in that wise indicates that either you have poor reading comprehension, have trouble thinking clearly, or both.

[MMMMMM]

"If Iraqi's want freedom and self determination they should fight for it."

But this conflicts wholly with your own stated view in this thread: Iraqis fighting to be liberated from Saddam would inevitably kill some innocent people, which, according to you, is immoral and unacceptable--even if it ends up saving a greater number of lives and removing a terrible tyrant.

[ACPlayer]

The two situations are not morally equivalent. Even you know that.

We invade for "strategic" purposes (basically money) hiding behind a facade of humanitarianism vs a people who are trying to free themselves.

One is Murder the other is Self Defense. .

[MMMMMM]

From the perspective of the victims, it makes no difference.

You are conflating issues.

[nicky g]

Somewhere in this thread I wrote that the Sarin shell was more interesting news than the expired mustard gas shell (as to all intents and purposes expired weapons are no more us than destoryed ones) if it was still active (ie hadn't deteriorated), but I wasn't sure if this were the case. According to this post on Open Democracy (www.opendemocracy.net), it was almost certainly an old expired weapon:

[ QUOTE ]
Several reports (e.g. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/3722855.stm) suggest that the artillery shell containing sarin which exploded in Baghdad was of a binary design, i.e. it contained two relatively non-toxic components which are mixed after firing of the round to form sarin. This is extremely unlikely as, while it is true that Iraq had developed a binary system for the production of nerve agents - such as Sarin, their process involved loading and mixing the chemicals before launching the weapon. Their system was designed for use in aerial bombs and missile warheads and was not readily applicable for use in artillery rounds of this type.

It is also extremely unlikely that the shell had been recently filled with sarin, as artillery shells of this design are filled via the "burster well" - the hole at the top of the shell where the burster charge and fuze are inserted. After filling the shell the steel "burster tube" - the tube into which the explosive charge will later be inserted - must be fitted and pressed home with a hydraulic press. To do this requires special facilities and this, in combination with the extreme toxicity of sarin and its high volatility, means that it is not something that could readily be done in a makeshift local facility or workshop.

It is almost certain, therefore, that the shell was, as described in several reports, left over from Iraq's pre-1991 stocks. Iraqi sarin was impure and unstabilised and tended to degrade in a matter of weeks. In a sealed artillery shell many complex degradation reactions would occur and very little, if any, sarin would remain after all this time. This probably explains why the exposed soldiers appear not have suffered any serious harm. They would have noticed the distinctive ester smell of decomposed sarin and the acid vapours present would more than likely have affected their eyes.

Iraq frequently did not mark its chemically filled rounds so it is quite possible that those who decided to use it as part of an Improvised Explosive Device (IED) had no idea what it contained.

[Ron Manley served with the UN commission in Iraq responsible for the technical oversight of Unscom’s operations (1991-94). From 1993-2001, he worked at the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW), ultimately as director of its verification division (2000-2001). See his interview with openDemocracy "Iraq and chemical weapons: a view from the inside", 10 July 2003 http://www.opendemocracy.net/debates/article.jsp?id=2&amp;debateId=95&amp;articleId=1351 ]

[/ QUOTE ]

Sarin in Iraq (http://www.opendemocracy.net/forums/thread.jspa?forumID=77&amp;threadID=42671&amp;tstart=0)

[MMMMMM]

Just a sidenote, Nicky: yesterday Neal Boortz wrote that "we learned" something on his show the day before regarding Sarin (I presume this means he had someone knowledgable or expert on to discuss the matter). He went on to write that the amount of (pre-mix) Sarin in that shell--4 liters--is enough Sarin to kill 60,000 people. If that's anywhere close to the truth, maybe it will give you another way to look at how effective poison gas shells can be in warfare and why they might legitimately be classified as WMD.

[nicky g]

If it's true that firing that one shell over a densely populated area could kill that many people, then I;ll change my opinion on chemical weapons not being WMDs. I'm pretty sure that isn;t true of mustard gas.

[MMMMMM]

It surprised me too; I don't know how true it is, though. The newer nerve gases like VX though are WAY more powerful than mustard gas. Also, maybe that figure means if that amount of Sarin were perfectly adminitered to 60,000 people. If a fired shell could kill even a substantial fraction of that number, though, these things are not mere conventional weapons, especially since they can be fired in a pattern to blanket a large area with gas.

[nicky g]

Well I certainly agree they're not conventioanl weapons. I don;t know that they should be put alongside nukes though.