Posted on 05/18/2004 8:55:45 AM PDT by areafiftyone
Far from being an isolated incident, yesterday's discovery in Iraq of an artillery shell filled with Sarin gas is just the tip of the iceberg of recently uncovered evidence that Saddam Hussein had a weapons of mass destruction program that was fully operational until the U.S. invaded in March 2003.
Tuesday's Wall Street Journal reports that the U.S. inspectors have found within the last few months "warehouses full of commercial and agricultural chemicals," which, if mixed and packaged properly, "could quickly become chemical weapons."
U.S. forces in Karabala have also recently uncovered 55-gallon drums loaded with chemicals that were said to be "pesticide," some of which were stored in what military sources described as a "camouflaged bunker complex."
Why camouflage insect spray?
The alleged agricultural site just happened to be located alongside a military ammunition dump, reports Insight Magazine.
According to the Journal, Iraq Survey Group head Charles Duelfer recently told Congress that some of Saddam's WMD facilities were newly built and contained "stockpiled" raw materials that would have allowed him to "produce such weapons on a moment's notice."
There's more.
In early April, Jordanian authorities foiled an al Qaida plot to kill 80,000 people in chemical weapons attack in Amman.
According to one of the conspirators whose confession was broadcast on Jordanian TV, al Qaida WMD specialist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, who was last seen in a chilling video beheading Nick Berg, trained and outfitted the WMD attackers
in pre-war Iraq.
Like notorious terrorists Abu Nidal and Abu Abbas, Zarqawi enjoyed sanctuary in Baghdad, courtesy of Saddam.
Jordanian TV coverage of the Zarqawi plot included video footage of hundreds of gallon jugs containing chemical weapons that had been intercepted 75 miles from the border with Syria, where much of Saddam's pre-war WMD stockpile is believes to have been hidden.
The Zarqawi revelation comes on the heels of the April 26 explosion at a suspected chemical weapons factory in Baghdad, just as a U.S. weapons inspection team arrived to inspect its contents.
Disguised as a "perfume factory," investigators believe the facility was booby-trapped to destroy evidence of whatever was inside.
We won't be surprised if, in the coming weeks, more Sarin-laden shells are uncovered in Iraq. But in the meantime, the media focus on the Abu Ghraib prison scandal has obscured that fact that the WMD case against Saddam is already compelling and continues to grow.
I assume you mean to infer that the US was more conservative, but actually, the reverse is true. Rememeber, this was a period of tremendous growth in the labor ie 'Progressive' movement. Before socialism was discredited with the collapse of the USSR 70 years later, there was a far reaching assumption that socialism was the natural progression of society.
Re: the media; As you say, time will tell. In the Net era, I greatly discount their influence, and assume that people who elevate its effects are actually working an angle in order to sell their own particular content. (See Hugh Hewitt.)
No, actually I didn't mean that at all — at least not in the modern political sense. Rather, I was thinking more along the lines of difference in social mores and media attitudes toward the nation then as opposed to now. Culturally, the country was far more — what's the best adjective to use — Victorian in its social mores. Most people were not ashamed of their patriotism, and that included most people in the media. The nakedly anti-American slant that we see in much of the so-called mainstream media today would have been unthinkable back then.
We should file class action law suits charging the RATmedia with consumer fraud for alleging to be news organizations when it is nothing but an arm of the democRAT party.
Wolfstar, you are obviously intelligent and can express yourself well, which is why I'm have difficultly reconciling this observation with some of your statements that seem to contradict that position. Perhaps you have not had a chance to explore the period in question to a greater depth or have been unduly influenced by popular perception as it is presented today.
On the contrary, Victorian/Edwardian ideals where smashed during WWI as the young men being slaughtered came to the realization that it was the previous generation that got them into the predictament they found themselves. The Roaring 20's was nothing more than a manifestation of a complete nihilistic mania that swept the country. The anti-armament movement became a world-wide phenomenon that contributed greatly to Hitler's rise to power. Socialism was on the ascendancy and widely believed to be the natural evoluton of society.
The Left has been on the defensive now for around 20 years. Granted, the legacy they left behind continues to fuel the growth of government, but as a viable alternative to free-market capitalism, they have nothing to offer. As support for this contention, what platform is Kerry running on? That he is not Bush; there simply is nothing else that he can advocate that would distinguish himself - that's how commanding the Right controls the agenda today.
Perhaps the problem is that I was not around in 1919 to see for myself. ;-)
Ping
Not quite so.
Both chlorine and ammonia are deadly toxins in their own right and are considered TIC's (Toxic Industrial Chemicals) that, unlike Sarin, have legitimate industrial uses. Other TICs that are cousins of Lewisite and Mustard Gas have been found in Iraq in non industrial settings.
"- Why havn't we seen this video since it was aired??"
Two reasons:
1. As yet, there hasn't been any "indisputable verification by an credible independent experts" that those jugs, in fact, contained chemical weapons.
2. And because the media is currently flogging an even bigger story about "U.S. forces firing on a wedding party, killing over forty innocent civilians, including 10 women and 15 children..."
bttt
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