Posted on 06/21/2006 2:39:13 PM PDT by COUNTrecount
On Fox right now
Do you think we could get CNN to open one of these cannisters live on TV to prove they are no longer effective?
One reason I think you are right is that we had lots of reports in the news in the 6 months after the invasion about WMD's being found, and then they were ALWAYS discounted or retracted. I think it unlikely that every single report was wrong. We also heard from private sources that things were being found...Mike was it you that heard that from a relative?
And David Kay also did a switcheroo on what he said was found. I am almost sure that happened.
The only thing that makes sense is that the WMD finding was being kept quiet for security reasons.
A secondary reason may have been that we had evidence of the culpability of certain elements of the Russian or Chinese government (or, of course, the French).
I don't think President Bush's PR failures account for this. Most of the press seems to be puzzled about this and aren't sure why this news would have been held back.. which leads me back to Republicanus's explanation.
I just read and re-read that post, MM, and it could be correct.
It would make sense to keep the WMD finding quiet for security reasons.
What I don't understand is the reluctance to talk about the Iraq/AQ connection. It was the second big reason for the war in Iraq.
Now the media will be forced to follow this story to understand why the discovery of these WMDs were not reported. The fact that they were there will never be questioned anymore. Their existence will have to be covered and the hiding of their existence will be the bait. Smart move.
My grandfather was attacked with mustard gas in WWI and won a Purple Heart as a result. His breathing by the end of his life was painful to listen to.
I think there is another reason and I have no idea what it is. It may be beyond the bounds of common sense.
If I recall correctly, one of the Presidents stated objectives was to return dignity to the Office when he was first elected. And it so needed to be returned. So needed. Anyhow, I think this colors a great deal of the PR coming outta the White House and in some ways it isn't so bad. Still, I think your right about what his PR campaign has been up till now. Have a great day.
I sat here and listened to H&C.
There is only a suggestion at this point that the chemical in these weapons is degraded.
ALSO....the delivery systems WERE REQUIRED to have been destroyed. These were not. They were available for refilling if necessary.
I'm not surprised to learn that Ford received briefings from Bush 41.
I wouldn't make the leap from that, however, that all past presidents stay in the loop. Somehow, the thought of GWB authorizing Jimmy Carter receive briefings on anything is far-fetched, don't you think?
I would love to have W in front of a whole season of Congress.
He would take a shell out of a bag and put it on the podium and say, "Gentlemen and Ladies, this is a friggin WMD. Its full of Sarin and would kill everyone in this building. I want everyone who said that I lied to get down on their knees and thank God I am a forgiving man!"
"Ted you start first!"
You're right about restoring dignity to the WH. I saw the president when he was campaiging as Governor Bush in 2000 several times and whenever he said that line, the audience absolutely erupted.
For those who don't have much information on the Iraq/Al Qaeda relationship which goes back to the early 90's and which the mainstream media wrote about frequently in the 90's, there is more information here:
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1327993/posts?page=212#212
Nice!!!
Read post #70 and 264...David Kay is an enemy of the president!!!
Can't read the whole thread, but the marxists already dismiss it. It doesn't count! Even though the two guests on Hannity And Colms both said apologies are due.
And they take this position not knowing what the still "classified" info is. Good Lord.
I will check back later when I can. I wish I was dumbfounded instead of numbly unsurprised.
:-)
All of it calculated to hurt the Bush Administration and make the Democrats look like angels. Which was probably the intention of the producers in the first place.
I understand they also had the failed Richard Clarke on the program, the guy who testified that Sandy Berger was a wonderful National Security Advisor - right before Berger got caught stealing Top Secret documents from the National Archives.
I saw the promotional material for this show, in which it said Cheney had to "take on the CIA". If Cheney did that, it's to his credit.
"Chemicals degrade slowly over time. They may be very potent still."
Does any FReeper know the half-life of Sarin under these circumstances of storage. If this is unclassified knowlege it should be fairly simple to tell if these shells are still lethal or not. (I'm assuming a direct first order decomposition to non-lethal products.)
This shuld be interesting, there are more docs that are supposed to be released.
Exactly. Now that Zarq is dead, and they have rolled up a significant number of the organization. They must feel comfortable enough to release at least some information.
Becki
ditto
I saw a chart on the internet not too long ago. I'll see if I can find it again.
Yes..Clarke was there with his evil smile...nannaj11
They should have released that information a long time ago, let the news broadcast the location and set a trap for AQ.
Thats what I would have done....
bump
The chemicals are most likely degraded by now but still potent. Like someone said lets store them under the dimocRATS beds.
However 5 years ago they were a heck of a lot more potent than they are today. Go back 10 years and they were really potent at the height of the UN poking around to no avail. The point is Sadam had them and did not turn them over. The degrading issue is just a red herring by the dimocRATS and means nothing. He had WMD's and in quantity.
"As long as we're tossing theories around how about this: Suppose the origins of the shells and/or their contents might embarass someone. Perhaps that somone is someone whose cooperation the Bush Administration is trying to acquire when dealing with other headline grabbing world events. Discretion would provide a useful trump card. Perhaps it's time to play that card."
Bingo!!
So you're implying we approved of their [Iraqi government] use of chemical weapons against anyone, in any shape or form? BULL****.
You willfully missed the first part of the news conference, when Senator Santorum quoted three dems saying TODAY in one form or another that there were never any WMD's-- that the Iraq war was fought on a false premise.
By the way, many of us here at FR also had plenty of reports that there were WMDs found, just nothing 'official' and certainly nothing with the bombshell effect of this announcement based on declassified documents.
Great obsevation!!!
Most of the evidence, besides the press release Saddam issued after 9-11 offering asylum to Osama (pause to reflect on that - reported by CNN and just as quickly forgotten by them as inconvenient), was either filtered through the Clinton-era CIA apparatchiks which were clearly incompetent and hostile to the administration (bunch of CYA going on in October of 2001), or were since found on the ground in Iraq.
That last part is crucial. Remember, for months the Saddamites were staging as much or more often than the terrorists. We had a Werewulf situation akin to what happened in the Occupation of Germany in 1945-46. (Werewulf units were Nazi troops mainly in Bavaria that were the final gasp of the Third Reich. The resistance/attacks lasted a long time).
There were a significant number of highly placed fascists (Baathists) with high clearances that were for months, at-large. There were a large number of risks involved in that phase - among them, the risk that if the Saddamites knew we had located certain caches, that they would accelerate their actions and precipitate a chemical attack out of panic. We could also use the caches to mousetrap them, which wouldn't work well if we blabbed about it. Until we rounded up the top echelon of these creatures, they still had a likelihood of knowing/accessing large caches of weapons & supplies, clearance and control of "resistance" cells, and the ability to grab cash and fund terrorist attacks to take the pressure off. We still haven't found all the money, by the way, but we did find hundreds of millions. (and gave it to the government of Iraq). Pretending cluelessness forces your enemy to underestimate you, to his death.
The documents and evidence found in Iraq wasn't fully dispersed or discussed until it had been analyzed. We're talking about details of who had influence, who was assigned certain areas of the country to attack/murder, as well as details of who approached the Taliban and what was done.Plus, we're talking the archives of an entire country. That's a lot to wade through and use.
The sensitive stuff was probably too buried or time-critical to use for political purposes. The historical record was clear on the connections - the democrats just tried to ignore it or to rewrite history completely.
Seems to me that there was always the attitude in the administration that "the truth will out".
And so, lately you've seen mass amounts of seized documents available for translation by the public. After all, we've caught or killed nearly every top criminal in Saddam's regime, and we've had time to transition out any human-intelligence sources that needed to be rescued.
In short, the proof was needed in the past for operational reasons - again, it looks like the administration kept quiet because the war was more important than politics.
I heard this on the radio on my way home and could hardly wait to get to FR to read the details -- thanks for the ping, Mike!!
Also, they started a WMD program long before we got involved with the Iraqis. They also had facilities to produce these weapons. They were buying them from all over them world.
To act like we are solely responsible for the current situation is laughable.
I know you fault the White House PR, but they ARE fighting a war and when they say something and it is ignored, I don't know what they can do. PLUS, a lot of this has to do with security. For example, (speculating here) if the strategy was to make flypaper for Al Qaeda in Iraq, they wouldn't talk about AQ, instead letting the happy press fiction of an insurgency and civil war lull the terrorists into thinking they weren't known. Now a whole bunch of them have been killed, including Zarqawi, and the news is leaking out.
I don't know for sure, of course. I just think that the President isn't stupid, and when people have been lying he has a better reason to keep his mouth shut than ignorance of PR. (Although I will freely admit that I am relieved that Scott McClellan is gone and Tony Snow has taken over.)
Which reminds me about something else. We know that Tony knows what he is doing...so how come HE, when asked about this, demurred and said that they couldn't be sure of the information yet? Surely Tony knows the value of this information!
Just back from D.C. and only heard about this story on Fox tonight. I cannot find it anywhere else - Drudge, USA Today, CNN, ABC, CBS. I certainly didn't expect the MSM to come out shouting about this, but it seems too big of a story not to make any news outlet other than Fox and Santorum's webpage.
Clue me in.
(Third paragraph from the bottom mentions 1.8 tons of low enriched uranium.)
The far left's new slogan will go from "Bush lied, people died" to "Bush told the truth, now I feel like a douche"
Ping to my post 338.
The dems will be spinning so fast, they'll screw themselves into the ground (like it's a bad thing?).
Makes sense...... Makes sense we weren't told earlier.
Moms and Dads of our military hero volunteers would have been more concerned than they already were.
Democrats trying to spin this one will look like _______. (fill in blank)
Is there any word on how much of the WMDs is believed to have been moved out of Iraq, or do the earlier estimates still appear to be accurate?
Better still, I say we pick the 500 most noxious libs in Congress, the MSM and Hollyweird -- demand that each of them keep one of these 'degraded' munitions on their dining room table for the next 20 years..... it will make a nice centerpiece and surely they will not have any safety concerns about these 'degraded' WMDs......
That caught my attention on Fox News Sunday too, when Tony refused to get drawn into a WMD question by Chris Wallace.
I remember when Gen. Hayden underwent his confirmation hearings for CIA Director a few weeks ago. He was asked by some snarling leftist whether he thought the connections between Iraq/AQ were overblown by Steven Hadley. Hayden said the information didn't stand up to scrutiny and there wasn't much of a relationship there. If he really believes this, he doesn't deserve to be the director of the CIA. And if, for national security reasons he doesn't want the jihadists to know what we know about that long-standing relationship, he should have declined to answer in open session.
It has been shown to be an even more substantial relationship since the documents were translated by freeper jveritas, so since we're all talking about the relationship in the blogosphere and there are books about it, I'm not sure what the president gains by keeping it quiet.
Now, it's entirely possible that there is a good reason to not let the public know just how correct the administration was. But then why did the president use this to justify the war to begin with?
I'm not a strategist; far from it. And you know I fully support the administration; it's just their PR campaign since Karen Hughes left has not been terribly good. I think Karen had very good instincts about what resonated with the average American and what battles were important to fight and which weren't worth the trouble.
My two cents.
And I meant to mention, too, that you're correct the president never said Saddam was responsible or even linked to 9/11. What he did say is that we were going to war with Iraq because of WMD and because of Saddam's support and harboring Al Qaeda.
With Carter and Clinton in there, and we wonder why there are leaks.....
:-)
Money and lives Hans Blix and the U.N. could have spared us, had they followed their own job description. Oil for food!
You still don't get it-- you think the War on Terror ended because we discovered 500 chemical weapon shells. Sad. What's your DU handle again?
Speculation is that we kept it a secret to prevent al-Qaeda from knowing that such armaments might still be found and used.
That's how the MSM introduces criticism they originate-- they attribute it to an unattributable source. Hmmmmm..
Of course, if that’s the case, either Santorum has independently determined that these are ALL the weapons we’re ever going to find, or he has revealed state secrets to al-Qaeda in a cynical attempt to boost his polls against Casey.
No, actually Santorum said there is evidence in the declassified report that there are more WMDs that have not been accounted for, of an unknown quantity, in addition to the 500 known weapons. As for the Casey remark, you sound like the only cynic here.
Personally, I’ll assume these shells are long-past-their-freshness-date junk, until more details emerge.
Well of course you will, since you refuse to acknowledge the possibility that President Bush was right all along.
PING
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.