I thought there were no weapons of mass destruction. How'd that nerve gas get in the roadside bomb in Iraq?
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I thought there were no weapons of mass destruction. How'd that nerve gas get in the roadside bomb in Iraq?
The spin doctors will say this doesn't prove anything. You see, it was JUST an artillery shell and there was no reason to go to war over a little old shell that doesn't even work right.
TDF
It doesn't, and trust me, I wish they would find them. It makes it easier. It is only ONE shell and it did not necessarily come from Saddam and Co. Anyway, it IS however a pretty interesting development.
Many Americans seem to think that our government knows everything, when in fact they know very little. I personally believe that WMD's existed in the past. I think there is sufficient evidence to support that belief. I do find it rather amusing that we seem to think that Saddam and Co. wouldn't be smart enough to hide them in the most difficult places for us to find. We seem to think all of the military intelligence in the world exists in the US. Guess what, there are lots of smart folks out there and some of them don't like America and were perfectly willing to help Saddam hide those weapons.
I just keep thinking of those pictures of the MIG's in the sand. We supposedly searched that area for weeks and saw NOTHING until the winds just so happened to reveal the tails of a plane. Then we found them. Guess what, those weapons will be a lot harder to find.
http://www.snopes.com/photos/military/sandplanes.asp
Last edited by weunice; 05-17-2004 at 01:13 PM. Reason: minor change in wording ...
CNN.com has quit running the story of the Sarin Gas Bomb anywhere on their website. What's up with that you commie liberal rag? I guess gay freaking marriages are the top news of the day for this sick country huh? Sorry guys but it just gets my goat!
Those are not MIG jets. Or else, Cheney planted those there just so they'd be found.
And, that was not sarin nerve gas in that shell. I don't believe it for a minute. After all, two top morons: Mike Wallace and Al Franken, have laughed and scoffed at the notion that Saddam had WMD's. And those two would know.
Here is the latest via FOX NEWS of course!
A roadside bomb containing sarin nerve agent (search) recently exploded near a U.S. military convoy, the U.S. military said Monday.
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Bush administration officials told Fox News that mustard gas (search) was also recently discovered.
Two people were treated for "minor exposure" after the sarin incident but no serious injuries were reported. Soldiers transporting the shell for inspection suffered symptoms consistent with low-level chemical exposure, which is what led to the discovery, a U.S. official told Fox News.
"The Iraqi Survey Group confirmed today that a 155-millimeter artillery round containing sarin nerve agent had been found," Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt (search), the chief military spokesman in Iraq, told reporters in Baghdad. "The round had been rigged as an IED (improvised explosive device) which was discovered by a U.S. force convoy."
The round detonated before it would be rendered inoperable, Kimmitt said, which caused a "very small dispersal of agent."
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A senior Bush administration official told Fox News that the sarin gas shell is the second chemical weapon discovered recently.
Two weeks ago, U.S. military units discovered mustard gas that was used as part of an IED. Tests conducted by the Iraqi Survey Group (search) — a U.S. organization searching for weapons of mass destruction — and others concluded the mustard gas was "stored improperly," which made the gas "ineffective."
They believe the mustard gas shell may have been one of 550 projectiles for which former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein failed to account when he made his weapons declaration shortly before Operation Iraqi Freedom began last year. Iraq also failed to then account for 450 aerial bombs with mustard gas. That, combined with the shells, totaled about 80 tons of unaccounted for mustard gas.
It also appears some top Pentagon officials were surprised by the sarin news; they thought the matter was classified, administration officials told Fox News.
An official at the U.N. Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission (UNMOVIC) headquarters in New York said the commission is surprised to hear news of the mustard gas.
"If that's the case, why didn't they announce it earlier?" the official asked.
The UNMOVIC official said the group needs to know more from the Bush administration before it's possible to determine if this is "old or new stuff. It is known that Iraq used sarin during the Iraq-Iran war, however.
Kimmitt said the shell belonged to a class of ordnance that Saddam's government said was destroyed before the 1991 Gulf war (search). Experts believe both the sarin and mustard gas weapons date back to that time.
"It was a weapon that we believe was stocked from the ex-regime time and it had been thought to be an ordinary artillery shell set up to explode like an ordinary IED and basically from the detection of that and when it exploded, it indicated that it actually had some sarin in it," Kimmitt said.
The incident occurred "a couple of days ago," he added. The discovery reportedly occurred near Baghdad International Airport.
Washington officials say the significance of the find is that some chemical shells do still exist in Iraq, and it's thought that fighters there may be upping their attacks on U.S. forces by using such weapons.
The round was an old "binary-type" shell in which two chemicals held in separate sections are mixed after firing to produce sarin, Kimmitt said.
He said he believed that insurgents who rigged the artillery shell as a bomb didn't know it contained the nerve agent, and that the dispersal of the nerve agent from such a rigged device was very limited.
The shell had no markings. It appears the binary sarin agents didn't mix, which is why there weren't serious injuries from the initial explosion, a U.S. official told Fox News.
"Everybody knew Saddam had chemical weapons, the question was, where did they go. Unfortunately, everybody jumped on the offramp and said 'well, because we didn't find them, he didn't have them,'" said Fox News military analyst Lt. Gen. Tom McInerney.
"I doubt if it's the tip of the iceberg but it does confirm what we've known ... that he [Saddam] had weapons of mass destruction that he used on his own people," Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, told Fox News. "This does show that the fear we had is very real. Now whether there is much more of this we don't know, Iraq is the size of the state of California."
But there were more reasons than weapons to get rid of Saddam, he added. "We considered Saddam Hussein a threat not just because of weapons of mass destruction," Grassley said.
Iraqi Scientist: You Will Find More
Gazi George, a former Iraqi nuclear scientist under Saddam's regime, told Fox News he believes many similar weapons stockpiled by the former regime were either buried underground or transported to Syria. He noted that the airport where the device was detonated is on the way to Baghdad from the Syrian border.
George said the finding likely will be the first in a series of discoveries of such weapons.
"Saddam is the type who will not store those materials in a military warehouse. He's gonna store them either underground, or, as I said, lots of them have gone west to Syria and are being brought back with the insurgencies," George told Fox News. "It is difficult to look in areas that are not obvious to the military's eyes.
"I'm sure they're going to find more once time passes," he continued, saying one year is not enough for the survey group or the military to find the weapons.
Saddam, when he was in power, had declared that he did in fact possess mustard-gas filled artilleries but none that included sarin.
"I think what we found today, the sarin in some ways, although it's a nerve gas, it's a lucky situation sarin detonated in the way it did ... it's not as dangerous as the cocktails Saddam used to make, mixing blister" agents with other gases and substances, George said.
Officials: Discovery Is 'Significant'
U.S. officials told Fox News that the shell discovery is a "significant" event.
Artillery shells of the 155-mm size are as big as it gets when it comes to the ordnance lobbed by infantry-based artillery units. The 155 howitzer can launch high capacity shells over several miles; current models used by the United States can fire shells as far as 14 miles. One official told Fox News that a conventional 155-mm shell could hold as much as "two to five" liters of sarin, which is capable of killing thousands of people under the right conditions in highly populated areas.
The Iraqis were very capable of producing such shells in the 1980s but it's not as clear that they continued after the first Gulf War.
In 1995, Japan's Aum Shinrikyo (search) cult unleashed sarin gas in Tokyo's subways, killing 12 people and sickening thousands. In February of this year, Japanese courts convicted the cult's former leader, Shoko Asahara, and sentence him to be executed.
Developed in the mid-1930s by Nazi scientists, a single drop of sarin can cause quick, agonizing choking death. There are no known instances of the Nazis actually using the gas.
Nerve gases work by inhibiting key enzymes in the nervous system, blocking their transmission. Small exposures can be treated with antidotes, if administered quickly.
Antidotes to nerve gases similar to sarin are so effective that top poison gas researchers predict they eventually will cease to be a war threat.
Fox News' Wendell Goler, Steve Harrigan, Ian McCaleb, Liza Porteus, James Rosen and The Associated Press contributed to this report.
I have a friend -- an FBI ageny -- on the ground in Iraq. I got an email from him today. To paraphrase:
We are winning and winning big, but do not underestimate the resourcefulness or the assets of the enemy and CNN, its propagande machine.
Liberals hate America...and CNN is liberal.
I'm an asshole! What's your excuse?
It was reported this am on CNN that the sarin was brought to Iraq by the Japanese contingent of "non-combat" personnel. This was sarin left over from the subway attack a while ago.
The names/words enemy, liberal and CNN definitely belong in the same sentence! This does not apply to my fellow DAWGS on BB&B of course.Originally Posted by CARTEK
I am sure this is just the tip of the iceberg. We may not find it (WMD's) for a long time, but, you know it is there. CNN is just a joke! Could they be any more lame? They need to hire Bagdad Bob. At least he would be entertaining in his lies. CNN is not entertaining!
A liberal is a liberal.
You haven't heard this either: to date, we have collected over 2,000,000,000 pounds of ordinance and weapons in Iraq. Iraq is about the size of California. The US has ony 3,000,000,000 pounds of ordinance and weapons!
I'm an asshole! What's your excuse?
You're right. I haven't heard that.
The latest from http://www.foxnews.com
Tests Confirm Sarin in Iraqi Artillery Shell
Tuesday, May 18, 2004
By Liza Porteus
NEW YORK — Tests on an artillery shell that blew up in Iraq on Saturday confirm that it did contain an estimated three or four liters of the deadly nerve agent sarin (search), Defense Department officials told Fox News Tuesday.
OAS_AD('Middle'); http://altfarm.mediaplex.com/ad/bn/35902?mpt=435436927The artillery shell was being used as an improvised roadside bomb, the U.S. military said Monday. The 155-mm shell exploded before it could be rendered inoperable, and two U.S. soldiers were treated for minor exposure to the nerve agent.
Three liters is about three-quarters of a gallon; four liters is a little more than a gallon.
"A little drop on your skin will kill you" in the binary form, said Ret. Air Force Col. Randall Larsen, founder of Homeland Security Associates. "So for those in immediate proximity, three liters is a lot," but he added that from a military standpoint, a barrage of shells with that much sarin in them would more likely be used as a weapon than one single shell.
The soldiers displayed "classic" symptoms of sarin exposure, most notably dilated pupils and nausea, officials said. The symptoms ran their course fairly quickly, however, and as of Tuesday the two had returned to duty.
The munition found was a binary chemical shell, meaning it featured two chambers, each containing separate chemical compounds. Upon impact with the ground after the shell is fired, the barrier between the chambers is broken, the chemicals mix and sarin is created and dispersed.
Intelligence officials stressed that the compounds did not mix effectively on Saturday. Due to the detonation, burn-off and resulting spillage, it was not clear exactly how much harmful material was inside the shell.
A 155-mm shell can hold two to five liters of sarin; three to four liters is likely the right number, intelligence officials said.
Another shell filled with mustard gas (search), possibly also part of an improvised explosive device (IED) was discovered on May 2, Defense Dept. officials said.
The second shell was found by passing soldiers in a median on a thoroughfare west of Baghdad. It probably was simply left there by someone, officials said, and it was unclear whether it was meant to be used as a bomb.
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Testing done by the Iraqi Survey Group (search) — a U.S.-organized group of weapons inspectors who have been searching for weapons of mass destruction (search) since the ouster of Saddam Hussein — concluded that the mustard gas was "stored improperly" and was thus "ineffective."
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"It's not out of the ordinary or unusual that you would find something [like these weapons] in a haphazard fashion" in Iraq, Edward Turzanski, a political and national security analyst, told Fox News on Tuesday.
But "you have to be very careful not to be entirely dismissive of it," he added. "It remains to be seen whether they have more shells like this."
Iraq: A 'Bazaar of Weapons'
New weapons caches are being found every day, experts said, including "hundreds of thousands" of rocket-propelled grenades and portable anti-aircraft weapons.
"Clearly, if we're gonna find one or two of these every so often — used as an IED or some other way — the threat is not all that high, but it does confirm suspicion that he [Saddam] did have this stuff," said Ret. U.S. Army Col. Robert Maginnis.
"It is a bazaar of weapons that are available on every marketplace throughout that country," Maginnis added. "We're doing everything we can to aggressively disarm these people, but there were so many things that were stored away by Saddam Hussein in that country ... it's a huge job that we're tackling."
Some experts were concerned that enemy fighters with access to potential weapons of mass destruction in a country full of stockpiles could mean more risk to coalition forces and Iraqis.
"What we don't know is if there are other shells, which there certainly could be," said Dennis Ross, a former ambassador and special Middle East coordinator and a Fox News foreign affairs analyst. "We also don't know whether or not these kind of shells could be used as explosives, which could have a more devastating effect on our troops."
Other experts said the individual shells themselves don't pose a threat to the masses.
"I'm not as concerned they're going to use a lot of chemical munitions," Maginnis said. "They're not gonna use these as improvised explosive devices because they don't have a big blast associated with them, but they do combine those two compounds into the noxious sarin gas. But they can't do it all that well with a small explosive charge."
"The reality is, they'd have to have a whole bunch of these things," he added, "have to find some way of blowing them with a large charge to even create a cloud."
That doesn't mean insurgents couldn't find a better way to make the devices to create a more "terrorist-type of attack" against U.S. forces, Maginnis continued.
The task of military analysts in Baghdad will be to determine how old the sarin shell is. A final determination will have a significant effect on how weapons researchers and inspectors proceed.
Some experts suggested that the two shells, which were unmarked, date back to the first Persian Gulf War. The mustard gas shell may have been one of 550 projectiles that Saddam failed to account for in his weapons declaration shortly before Operation Iraqi Freedom began. Iraq also failed to account for 450 aerial bombs containing mustard gas.
It's not clear if enemy fighters simply found an old stockpile of weapons, or if they even knew what was inside.
Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld reacted cautiously to the news of the discoveries.
"What we have to then do is to try to track down and figure out how it might be there, what caused that to be there in this improvised explosive device, and what might it mean in terms of the risks to our forces," Rumsfeld said Monday.
Kurds: We Have Evidence of WMD
An Iraqi Kurdish official had no doubt similar substances will be found as the weapons hunt continues.
"We don't know where they are, but we suspect they are hidden in many locations in Iraq," Howar Ziad, the Kurdish representative to the United Nations, told Fox News on Tuesday. "It's quite possible that even the neighboring states who are against the reform of Iraq ... are helping the Saddamites in hiding."
"As we know, the Baathist regime had a track record of using" these chemicals against people in Iraq, such as the Kurds, Ziad continued. "He's [Saddam] never kept any commitment he's ever made to the international committee nor to the people" to not use such deadly materials.
Saddam's regime used sarin in mass amounts during an air attack on the Kurdish town of Halabja (search) in 1988, toward the end of the Iran-Iraq War. More than 5,000 people are believed to have died in Halabja and surrounding villages, with more than 65,000 were injured.
Both Iraq and Iran used chemical weapons during the 1980-88 war.
Ziad said the United Nations, the World Health Organization and others had not "bothered" to travel to the Iraqi Kurdistan to see the firsthand effects sarin and other chemical weapons had on people and to get proof that Saddam did in fact possess such weapons.
"We have evidence — we have victims of the use of those agents, and we're still waiting for WHO and the U.N. to come investigate," Ziad said.
Fox News' Bret Baier, Mike Emanuel and Ian McCaleb contributed to this report
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