SARIN GAS FOUND IN FALLUJAH

NPR ^ | 11/11/04

[southparkGOP]

You'll need speakers to hear this. Embedded NPR reporter with Bravo Company, 1st Marine Battalion, 3rd Regiment, found suitcase with Sarin nerve gas. Unclear where it came from. In either case, war is justified because WMD have been found, or if it's Al Qaeda's I'd much rather it brought to Iraq to fight our military than brought to New York.

http://www.npr.org/rundowns/segment.php?wfId=4164561

[bored at work]

Has this been confirmed? I cant find anything on NPR. The article you link doesn't say anything about sarin gas . . .

[LanaTurnerOverdrive]

hardly! If you have been reading the reports (before the media yanked them), you would have read that there have been tons of WMD discovered and destoyed since day one of this war!

Tons of WMD? And you read this where? If you "actually" saw this, instead of....you know....made it up, then I'm sure Rumsfeld, Rice, Cheney, etc saw it as well. Not a word from them about it anywhere. Seriously, TONS of WMD have been found and the MSM covered it up before the president heard about it? Yet somehow you managed to uncover the biggest story in a generation? Please cite your evidence.

[George W. Bush]

On the contrary, I know nothing that Secretary Rumsfeld doesn't. For instance, the binary shell cache was confirmed by the DoD and spun by the media.

Oh? Please provide a link to the DoD report or statements by Rumsfeld or the senior commanders in Iraq to substantiate your claim. Looking at your BBC link, it only talks about what some unnamed American(s) said about the shell, mentioned contamination and that it was supposedly a binary shell filled with the binary compounds to make sarin. But when it exploded, there was just a little contamination.

I find this all hard to believe. Given how lethal sarin is and the fact that at least some of it would have mixed in its use as a roadside bomb, we should have had undeniable sarin casualties. And yet, none were reported subsedquently.

I just don't trust sources like NPR and BBC and private web pages and internet conspiracy-mongering pages like DEBKA.

Hmmm.... Been a few hours now. Wonder why they're "covering up" the big new WMD story.

Too bad really. I'd be just as happy if they found some so we wouldn't have to hear about it any more. WMD has become irrelevant except to historians because even if we were attacked now with WMD, it would be hard to prove it belonged to Saddam and wasn't supplied by rogue Russian scientists or Iran or North Korea etc.

[NonValueAdded]

If it were manufactured in Iraq, would they label it in English?

Yes, they would translate the name to English as "baby formula" or "aspirin".

[George W. Bush]

Tons of WMD? And you read this where?

Well, it is actually true if you count high explosives as WMD. There have been thousands of tons of those destroyed.

But those are not nuclear, chemical or biological weapons.

Naturally, the waste products of Saddam's old nuke program haven't been destroyed and are still at their official site under guard. They're too poisonous and dangerous to destroy so they'll have to be stored. But they are not and never can be weapons grade or even a good dirty-bomb.

[George W. Bush]

Freepers knew what Dan Rather didn't...

Oh, I think ol' Dandy Dan knew all along. He was in on it. He just thought everyone was too stupid to catch him.

Your point granted about Blather, I would remind you that FReepers haven't ever seemed to know anything that Rumsfeld and our commanders didn't know first.

Two very different things.

[Tula Git]

Am I missing something here..
the audio says sarin gas KITS!

[Red6]

No, now they will shift the bench mark for success as they already did when two US soldiers were exposed to Sarin from a bomb in April or so. Now they will claim "No substantial amounts of WMD have been found".

1. No substantial amounts were found.

2. It was brought in after the war ended with Iraq.

3. It was produced before 91 and is old stuff left around and not really effective anyway.

Those will be the counter arguments. However, mainstream media will just ignore it anyway. Fact is. There have been MANY finds of WMD, but none were large. However, before a war, you don’t leave it in a large depot either. You distribute it! But unless the US finds a depot with 20,000 tons of Sarin all stamped 1999 on the side with a tag on the front saying “Saddams secret WMD stash”. Someone, somewhere will try to argue it all away. The Arab media and the Germans/French media won’t want to give it much attention (It plays against their agenda), US mainstream media seems to be def on one side of its head as well when it deals with the war in Iraq.

Red6

[WOSG]

The timing of this report, just days after the election, is highly suspicious. We must find out the truth via Dan Blather.

[cake_crumb]

http://www.defenselink.mil/news/May2004/n05172004_200405174.html

[fooman]

see above. THe media propaganda has gotten to you. I think it more the case that either W & rummy cant say the WMD went syria or lebanon ( dems would say we should go get whilst still tied up with IRaq) or they tired of trying to refute the big lie.

Rememer, the swifties were 'discredited' by big media even tho they had all facts and lurch never signed 180....

[fooman]

I heard the story on the NPR site...

[fooman]

American Forces Press Service


Roadside Bomb Releases Sarin Gas in Baghdad

By Donna Miles
American Forces Press Service

WASHINGTON, May 17, 2004 -- A roadside bomb containing the nerve agent sarin — a substance Saddam Hussein's regime insisted it had destroyed more than a decade ago — exploded near a U.S. military convoy traveling near Baghdad, coalition officials said today.

Army Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt, deputy operations director for Multinational Force Iraq, told reporters in Baghdad a U.S. convoy found the 155-millimeter artillery round rigged as an improvised explosive device. The round detonated before the explosive ordnance team could render it inert, Kimmitt said, spewing a small amount of sarin gas.

The release caused two soldiers to be treated for only "minor exposure," Kimmitt said, and the surrounding area needed no additional decontamination.

Kimmitt said whoever rigged the device, likely from old regime stockpiles, probably did not realize that it contained the deadly nerve agent sarin.

The effect of the explosion was minimal because the agent was used in a roadside bomb rather than being fired by an artillery piece, Kimmitt said.

The type of round used, a "binary chemical projectile," has two chambers that keep the chemical components inside separate until they are fired by an artillery piece, Kimmitt explained. After firing, the rotation of the artillery shell in flight causes the barrier between the two substances to mix, creating sarin. The device releases the agent when it lands and explodes.

However, when the round is used in an improvised explosive device, Kimmitt said, the chemicals don't properly mix, so they produce only "very, very small traces" of sarin gas. "When you rig it as an IED, it just blows up and you have … minor amounts (of the chemical) going in different directions," he said. "It's virtually ineffective as a chemical weapon."

Kimmitt said the incident does not pose a continuing threat. He said he would leave it to the Iraqi Survey Group to determine if the incident gives credence to charges that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction.

"The former regime had declared all such rounds destroyed before the 1991 Gulf War," he said.

[fooman]

Anyone want *minor exposure* from these *non-existent* chems?

[cake_crumb]

Archives take a bit of searching, but I posted a DoD link for him.

[Red6]

This is a question that needs to be asked to all those journalists ignoring these minor details.

Gee Mr. Rather, I will believe you when you say no Chemical weapons have been found if you're willing to expose yourself to a "little" bit of Sarin.

Red6

[fooman]

The propaganda has repeated so many times, even our people believe it.

I wonder why Powell backed off the portable germ factory trucks after they matched accounts.


THere is stuff going on behind the scenes me thinks..

[fooman]

Did the Duelfer report not have the 53 shells? Some of which I think were mustard gas.

[LanaTurnerOverdrive]

Well, it is actually true if you count high explosives as WMD.

Agreed. But in the run-up to the war I don't recall "high explosives" being mentioned a single time. It was always "chemical, biological or nuclear." It still is, as far as I can tell. I guess I would like to know why anyone else would consider high explosives WMD when no one in the administration seems to. Or, I would still like to see some evidence that TONS of chemical, biological or nuclear weapons have been discovered and destroyed.

[txhurl]

Those Japanese hostages brung it with em and forgot to ask for it back.