Dozens Dead in Triple Bombing in Baghdad

BAGHDAD -- Iraqi officials say the death toll from a string of blasts in a Shiite neighborhood in southwestern Baghdad has jumped to 34.

Two police officials said the bombs targeted a Shiite mosque as well as a market Thursday evening.

Officials from the hospitals where the dead and injured were taken confirmed the casualty figures.

Even the Bush administration pretty much dropped the alumimum tubes rationale by 2004. See here for a point-by-point debuming: "On March 7, 2003, El Baradei reported the IAEA’s major findings on the aluminum tubes to the Security Council. After conducting a thorough investigation of Iraq's attempts to purchase large quantities of high-strength aluminum tubes, he said that extensive field investigation and document analysis failed to uncover any evidence that Iraq intended to use these 81 millimeter tubes for any project other than the reverse engineering of rockets. He said that the IAEA had found no evidence or plausible indication of the revival of a nuclear weapons program in Iraq. The IAEA also did not find any evidence that any of the 160,000 tubes Iraq imported in the 1980’s had been diverted to centrifuges.

The IAEA assembled a specially qualified team of international centrifuge manufacturing experts from the United States, Germany, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom. This team concluded that Iraq's efforts to import these aluminum tubes “were not likely to have been related to the manufacture of centrifuges and, moreover, that it was highly unlikely that Iraq could have achieved the considerable re-design needed to use them in a revived centrifuge program.”

With the economy and his anti-war supporters going south on him it wouldn’t suprise me to see him do a big pullout before the election.

As of now and in accordance with the SOFA, the U.S. military should be out of Iraq by December 31 of this year.

The only way that would change is if Iraq asks a contingent to stay beyond that date.

The State Department intends to have a significant presence after December 31.

This could all change, but as of now, activities in Iraq are geared to base closures and troop reductions.

And hundreds of WMDs in his shorts tew! lol

Report: Hundreds of WMDs Found in Iraq

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,200499,00.html

Excerpt:

The United States has found 500 chemical weapons in Iraq since 2003, and more weapons of mass destruction are likely to be uncovered, two Republican lawmakers said Wednesday.

“We have found weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, chemical weapons,” Sen. Rick Santorum, R-Pa., said in a quickly called press conference late Wednesday afternoon.

Reading from a declassified portion of a report by the National Ground Intelligence Center, a Defense Department intelligence unit, Santorum said:

“Since 2003, coalition forces have recovered approximately 500 weapons munitions which contain degraded mustard or sarin nerve agent. Despite many efforts to locate and destroy Iraq’s pre-Gulf War chemical munitions, filled and unfilled pre-Gulf War chemical munitions are assessed to still exist.”

I'd be happy to discuss chemical weapons with you but we left unfinished our odiscussion about whether Saddam was "getting started on" a nuclear program in 2001. This was the "scary" rationale (remember Condi's mushroom cloud?) after all for the war.

Let's finish this discussion. I provided counterevidence to your claim about the uranimum in barrels (e.g the original IAEA seals from the early 1990s were not broken) and the aluminum tubes (e.g the Department of Energy and other agencies concluded that they were unsuitable for nukes). Awaiting your refutation to these specific points.

The IAEA isn't credible. Their assessment of Iran's programs alone is proof of that and is one of dozens of failures that show it to be useless. Let's look at a more credible assessment.

Iraq’s Continuing Program for Weapons of Mass Destruction (National Intelligence Council)
(from October 2002 NIE)
We judge that Iraq has continued its weapons of mass destruction (WMD) programs in defiance of UN resolutions and restrictions. Baghdad has chemical and biological weapons as well as missiles with ranges in excess of UN restrictions; if left unchecked, it probably will have a nuclear weapon during this decade.
Since inspections ended in 1998, Iraq has maintained its chemical weapons effort, energized its missile program, and invested more heavily in biological weapons; in the view of most agencies, Baghdad is reconstituting its nuclear weapons program.
Although we assess that Saddam does not yet have nuclear weapons or sufficient material to make any, he remains intent on acquiring them. Most agencies assess that Baghdad started reconstituting its nuclear program about the time that UNSCOM inspectors departed-December 1998.
- Most agencies believe that Saddam's personal interest in and Iraq's aggressive attempts to obtain high-strength aluminum tubes for centrifuge rotors-as well as Iraq's attempts to acquire magnets, high-speed balancing machines, and machine tools-provide compelling evidence that Saddam is reconstituting a uranium enrichment effort for Baghdad's nuclear weapons program. (DOE agrees that reconstitution of the nuclear program is underway but assesses that the tubes probably are not part of the program.)
All agencies agree that about 25,000 centrifuges based on tubes of the size Iraq is trying to acquire would be capable of producing approximately two weapons' worth of highly enriched uranium per year.

Confidence Levels for Selected Key Judgments in This Estimate
High Confidence:
� Iraq is continuing, and in some areas expanding, its chemical, biological, nuclear and missile programs contrary to UN resolutions.
� We are not detecting portions of these weapons programs.
� Iraq possesses proscribed chemical and biological weapons and missiles.
� Iraq could make a nuclear weapon in months to a year once it acquires sufficient weapons-grade fissile material.

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