Posted on 06/22/2006 4:50:29 AM PDT by ChrisFelice1
Pennsylvania Senator Rick Santorum has been making the rounds claiming that the US has in fact discovered banned weapons in Iraq. The claims are based on the continuing sporadic appearance of pre-Gulf War I munitions containing variously disintegrated chemical weapons, and the Pentagon has said that the claims are crap: the munitions in question, mostly artillery rounds, are unusable and have been for years...
(Excerpt) Read more at btcnews.com ...
Who is the most high profile Democrat who has not said Bush lied?
Bill Clinton.
Why?
Because if he did, then the question has to be raised as to why his administration passed on bogus intelligence through George Tenet to the Bush adminsitration.
Sure they were found, but how much of a threat were they really.
My reply to your "supposition" is the same as I've questioned others who have advanced this line of reasoning.
Then, how about if we store a few of those "inert," "spent" sarin gas shells in your basement, garage, or in your closet?
Waiting for you and others who think same to stand up and accept?
Uh, didn't think so!!!!
I'm with you there, man. why do they hold back the results of the tests? it just gives the Libs an angle.
Recommend all doubting parties personally examine WMD specimens and sample their contents ASAP.
What happened to all the Scud missiles from Desert Storm?
Oh yeah...that's right..."Clinton destroyed all of them...in 1998" LOL
IMHO, the real reason that Bush is shutting up about WMD evidence is to save Putin's government. Bush figures taking the domestic political heat is less troublesome than dealing with the kind of (heavily nuclear armed) fascist dictatorship that might follow Putin's demise in Russia.
I see what you are saying but that just hasn't happened yet, so we don't have a strong enough case to get excited about. i'd hate to see us get buried if these '500 munitions' turn out to just the total of all the rotting degraded munitions found to date.
"Yet more than a year later, American troops still have not found any weapons of mass destruction (unless a single artillery shell, produced in the 1980s, that possibly contained sarin nerve gas, counts)."
Daalder and Lindsay sure do pick their words carefully! Their spinning would be good fodder for a SNL skit.
It's almost too easy to write the script for the two SNL comedians playing Daalder and Lindsay:
"Although Santorum talked of weapons being found in Iraq, he was alluding to the broken Saracen blades that US troops found in the Iraq museum."LOL
Great point.
"Sure they were found, but how much of a threat were they really."
If you come a cross a snake, assuming you can't immediately identify it, do you treat it as poisonous or not?
If you picked up a rusted old gun, would not treat it as if it were loaded and capable of working?
If you picked up a stick of dynamite, labeled as such, but stamped with the date 1884, would you not handle it with care?
Your "they weren't much of a threat" comment shows a lack of intelligence; whenever you deal with a WEAPON, you assume that it is capable of working or going off at any time.
Perhaps some of the shells might have been "degraded" or "inert", but it does not automatically follow that ALL of them were. It alsop doesn't follow that since we've 500 of them that we've found every last one the Iraqis hid. There are more of them out there, I'll guarentee it. I'll also guarentee that had a terrorist gotten his grubby hands on one of these things, he just might have tried to salvage that sarin or mustard gas and put it to use.
I wonder how the "it was degraded" crowd would react to that?
No weapon is ever INERT or DEGRADED until it is used, destroyed/disarmed by professionals or reclaimed completely by the earth. Just ask all the French farmers who keep losing crops and livestock to buried-and-never-found chemical rounds for the First World War. It's a common occurrance.
One other thing, becuaser you probably bought the second half of the dimwit's argument; the democrats have gone from arguing that there were no WMDs in Iraq, to having proof shoved in their face, to now arguing "yeah,but these aren't the RIGHT WMDS". That 'logic', besides being ridiculous, implies there are other WMDs out there, just waiting to be found, and that democrats KNOW about it.
The MSM is going to say: this is all a political stunt from Santorum because his poll numbers are down...and he's trying to resurrect himself with this "OLD FIND". Just wait and see...
$6 billion in direct costs, five dead soldiers and 40 wounded, not to mention hundreds of dead Iraqis, for each unusable round. Heckuva job, George.
That's a good point. The US has kept plenty of Pre-Gulf War weaponry, because it could be useful for killing or destroying an enemy.
People who say, "No 15 year-old weapons can cause damage," are idiots.
They did that last night.
hmmmm
It is nice to know that these materials are harmless. We should bring them back as trophies of war and display them. (Outside the New York Times seems like a good spot.)
This would demonstrate how safe these "old, deteriorated" weapons are.
Yep. Old ordnance still goes BOOM. And very well, too.
I think most of the stuff I handled in the 80's was Vietnam surplus, at the very least (former AO1).
Have a Navy Day!
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