WMD's found in Iraq

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Milforum Mac Daddy
You anti-war nuts can now shut-up!!!!

WASHINGTON — 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."
Click here to read the declassified portion of the NGIC report.
He added that the report warns about the hazards that the chemical weapons could still pose to coalition troops in Iraq.
"The purity of the agents inside the munitions depends on many factors, including the manufacturing process, potential additives and environmental storage conditions. While agents degrade over time, chemical warfare agents remain hazardous and potentially lethal," Santorum read from the document.

(Story continues below)


"This says weapons have been discovered, more weapons exist and they state that Iraq was not a WMD-free zone, that there are continuing threats from the materials that are or may still be in Iraq," said Rep. Pete Hoekstra, R-Mich., chairman of the House Intelligence Committee.
The weapons are thought to be manufactured before 1991 so they would not be proof of an ongoing WMD program in the 1990s. But they do show that Saddam Hussein was lying when he said all weapons had been destroyed, and it shows that years of on-again, off-again weapons inspections did not uncover these munitions.
Hoekstra said the report, completed in April but only declassified now, shows that "there is still a lot about Iraq that we don't fully understand."
Asked why the Bush administration, if it had known about the information since April or earlier, didn't advertise it, Hoekstra conjectured that the president has been forward-looking and concentrating on the development of a secure government in Iraq.
Offering the official administration response to FOX News, a senior Defense Department official pointed out that the chemical weapons were not in useable conditions.
"This does not reflect a capacity that was built up after 1991," the official said, adding the munitions "are not the WMDs this country and the rest of the world believed Iraq had, and not the WMDs for which this country went to war."
The official said the findings did raise questions about the years of weapons inspections that had not resulted in locating the fairly sizeable stash of chemical weapons. And he noted that it may say something about Hussein's intent and desire. The report does suggest that some of the weapons were likely put on the black market and may have been used outside Iraq.
He also said that the Defense Department statement shortly after the March 2003 invasion saying that "we had all known weapons facilities secured," has proven itself to be untrue.
"It turned out the whole country was an ammo dump," he said, adding that on more than one occasion, a conventional weapons site has been uncovered and chemical weapons have been discovered mixed within them.
Hoekstra and Santorum lamented that Americans were given the impression after a 16-month search conducted by the Iraq Survey Group that the evidence of continuing research and development of weapons of mass destruction was insignificant. But the National Ground Intelligence Center took up where the ISG left off when it completed its report in November 2004, and in the process of collecting intelligence for the purpose of force protection for soldiers and sailors still on the ground in Iraq, has shown that the weapons inspections were incomplete, they and others have said.
"We know it was there, in place, it just wasn't operative when inspectors got there after the war, but we know what the inspectors found from talking with the scientists in Iraq that it could have been cranked up immediately, and that's what Saddam had planned to do if the sanctions against Iraq had halted and they were certainly headed in that direction," said Fred Barnes, editor of The Weekly Standard and a FOX News contributor.
"It is significant. Perhaps, the administration just, they think they weathered the debate over WMD being found there immediately and don't want to return to it again because things are otherwise going better for them, and then, I think, there's mindless resistance to releasing any classified documents from Iraq," Barnes said.
The release of the declassified materials comes as the Senate debates Democratic proposals to create a timetable for U.S. troops to withdraw from Iraq. The debate has had the effect of creating disunity among Democrats, a majority of whom shrunk Wednesday from an amendment proposed by Sen. John Kerry of Massachusetts to have troops to be completely withdrawn from Iraq by the middle of next year.
At the same time, congressional Republicans have stayed highly united, rallying around a White House that has seen successes in the last couple weeks, first with the death of terror leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, then the completion of the formation of Iraq's Cabinet and then the announcement Tuesday that another key Al Qaeda in Iraq leader, "religious emir" Mansour Suleiman Mansour Khalifi al-Mashhadani, or Sheik Mansour, was also killed in a U.S. airstrike.
Santorum pointed out that during Wednesday's debate, several Senate Democrats said that no weapons of mass destruction had been found in Iraq, a claim, he said, that the declassified document proves is untrue.
"This is an incredibly — in my mind — significant finding. The idea that, as my colleagues have repeatedly said in this debate on the other side of the aisle, that there are no weapons of mass destruction, is in fact false," he said.
As a result of this new information, under the aegis of his chairmanship, Hoekstra said he is going to ask for more reporting by the various intelligence agencies about weapons of mass destruction.
"We are working on the declassification of the report. We are going to do a thorough search of what additional reports exist in the intelligence community. And we are going to put additional pressure on the Department of Defense and the folks in Iraq to more fully pursue a complete investigation of what existed in Iraq before the war," Hoekstra said.
FOX News' Jim Angle and Sharon Kehnemui Liss contributed to this report.

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


There are WMDs in Iraq, Saddam is a scumbag, and the United States of America and her allies help liberate a nations from an oppressive government.



So to all of you Anti-War liberals. Cram it up your piece pipe and smoke it!
 
Nice find Luis... bam baby... he could go all the way!

So this will take some serious steam outta the "Bush lied and has credibility issues" camp. Hmmm.
 
I'm not an anti-war nut ... but ...

I'm not an anti-war nut ... but ... I still believe that GW misled the world when he decided to invade Iraq.

As far as the article you quoted, read the article a little closer before you get on the 'anti-Bush nuts are wrong' bandwagon.

The article said the following and I
Since 2003, coalition forces have recovered approximately 500 weapons munitions which contain degraded mustard or sarin nerve agent.
All of the rest of this article was political spin.

Where has GW's pre-invasion statements been proven valid ... 'huge chemical weapon stockpile', 'large chemical production program', and on and on and on??????? The ONLY thing which this disclosure has done has been to show that Saddam DID NOT have a huge stockpile or a production system in place at the time of the invasion. If he had, our forces would have found a hell of a lot more weapons. As a matter of fact, the independent weapons inspectors reports stated that everything they were able to uncover prior to the invasion led them to believe that there was NO STOCKPILE (and) NO ACTIVE CHEMICAL PROGRAMS in Iraq at the time of the invasion.

SO - where is the big story??? All they have done is try to pump up Bush's numbers (along with the Republican's numbers), prior to the Mid-term Elections (and) the sad fact is they did it with information that has been available since late 2003 ... information which does not support GW's pre-invasion statements to say the least and no matter how they spin the facts they never will.
 
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Report: Hundreds of WMDs Found in Iraq

Wednesday, June 21, 2006

foxnews_story.gif



WASHINGTON — 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."

Click here to read the declassified portion of the NGIC report.

He added that the report warns about the hazards that the chemical weapons could still pose to coalition troops in Iraq.

"The purity of the agents inside the munitions depends on many factors, including the manufacturing process, potential additives and environmental storage conditions. While agents degrade over time, chemical warfare agents remain hazardous and potentially lethal," Santorum read from the document.


"This says weapons have been discovered, more weapons exist and they state that Iraq was not a WMD-free zone, that there are continuing threats from the materials that are or may still be in Iraq," said Rep. Pete Hoekstra, R-Mich., chairman of the House Intelligence Committee.

The weapons are thought to be manufactured before 1991 so they would not be proof of an ongoing WMD program in the 1990s. But they do show that Saddam Hussein was lying when he said all weapons had been destroyed, and it shows that years of on-again, off-again weapons inspections did not uncover these munitions.

Hoekstra said the report, completed in April but only declassified now, shows that "there is still a lot about Iraq that we don't fully understand."

Asked why the Bush administration, if it had known about the information since April or earlier, didn't advertise it, Hoekstra conjectured that the president has been forward-looking and concentrating on the development of a secure government in Iraq.

Offering the official administration response to FOX News, a senior Defense Department official pointed out that the chemical weapons were not in useable conditions.

"This does not reflect a capacity that was built up after 1991," the official said, adding the munitions "are not the WMDs this country and the rest of the world believed Iraq had, and not the WMDs for which this country went to war."

The official said the findings did raise questions about the years of weapons inspections that had not resulted in locating the fairly sizeable stash of chemical weapons. And he noted that it may say something about Hussein's intent and desire. The report does suggest that some of the weapons were likely put on the black market and may have been used outside Iraq.

He also said that the Defense Department statement shortly after the March 2003 invasion saying that "we had all known weapons facilities secured," has proven itself to be untrue.

"It turned out the whole country was an ammo dump," he said, adding that on more than one occasion, a conventional weapons site has been uncovered and chemical weapons have been discovered mixed within them.

Hoekstra and Santorum lamented that Americans were given the impression after a 16-month search conducted by the Iraq Survey Group that the evidence of continuing research and development of weapons of mass destruction was insignificant. But the National Ground Intelligence Center took up where the ISG left off when it completed its report in November 2004, and in the process of collecting intelligence for the purpose of force protection for soldiers and sailors still on the ground in Iraq, has shown that the weapons inspections were incomplete, they and others have said.

"We know it was there, in place, it just wasn't operative when inspectors got there after the war, but we know what the inspectors found from talking with the scientists in Iraq that it could have been cranked up immediately, and that's what Saddam had planned to do if the sanctions against Iraq had halted and they were certainly headed in that direction," said Fred Barnes, editor of The Weekly Standard and a FOX News contributor.

"It is significant. Perhaps, the administration just, they think they weathered the debate over WMD being found there immediately and don't want to return to it again because things are otherwise going better for them, and then, I think, there's mindless resistance to releasing any classified documents from Iraq," Barnes said.

The release of the declassified materials comes as the Senate debates Democratic proposals to create a timetable for U.S. troops to withdraw from Iraq. The debate has had the effect of creating disunity among Democrats, a majority of whom shrunk Wednesday from an amendment proposed by Sen. John Kerry of Massachusetts to have troops to be completely withdrawn from Iraq by the middle of next year.

At the same time, congressional Republicans have stayed highly united, rallying around a White House that has seen successes in the last couple weeks, first with the death of terror leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, then the completion of the formation of Iraq's Cabinet and then the announcement Tuesday that another key Al Qaeda in Iraq leader, "religious emir" Mansour Suleiman Mansour Khalifi al-Mashhadani, or Sheik Mansour, was also killed in a U.S. airstrike.

Santorum pointed out that during Wednesday's debate, several Senate Democrats said that no weapons of mass destruction had been found in Iraq, a claim, he said, that the declassified document proves is untrue.

"This is an incredibly — in my mind — significant finding. The idea that, as my colleagues have repeatedly said in this debate on the other side of the aisle, that there are no weapons of mass destruction, is in fact false," he said.

As a result of this new information, under the aegis of his chairmanship, Hoekstra said he is going to ask for more reporting by the various intelligence agencies about weapons of mass destruction.

"We are working on the declassification of the report. We are going to do a thorough search of what additional reports exist in the intelligence community. And we are going to put additional pressure on the Department of Defense and the folks in Iraq to more fully pursue a complete investigation of what existed in Iraq before the war," Hoekstra said.
 
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It simple amazes me how people still try to justify this...

Your own article states that the chemicals were pre-Gulf War (meaning they date from Iran-Iran war of the 1980s) degraded, the shells unfilled, and frankly 500 shells is not very much. There are more dangerous chemicals that get blown in the air from the smokestacks in New Jersey then a few obsolete shells. That's a far cry from Bush 'clear danger of WMD' and Blair's claims of '45 minute launch window' of non-exsistant ICBMs. Its like claiming an old broken down and rusted '68 Chevy is really a functioning racecar. Sorry, but that dont fly.

Nor is it the first time FOX NEWS claimed to found WMDs and they seem to be the only running this story. Recycled information from the ministry of propaganda is not news.

I'm sorry but Bones is right this smells more of pre-election politics than news.
 
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Your own article states that the chemicals were pre-Gulf War (meaning they date from Iran-Iran war of the 1980s) degraded, the shells unfilled, and frankly 500 shells is not very much. There are more dangerous chemicals that get blown in the air from the smokestacks in New Jersey then a few obsolete shells. That's a far cry from Bush 'clear danger of WMD' and Blair's claims of '45 minute launch window' of non-exsistant ICBMs. Its like claiming an old broken down and rusted '68 Chevy is really a functioning racecar. Sorry, but that dont fly.

Nor is it the first time FOX NEWS claimed to found WMDs and they seem to be the only running this story. Recycled information from the ministry of propaganda is not news.
Hmmm They actually report the whole story but yet its still propaganda, and just because CNN isnt running it it obviously isnt worth reporting.

This is an interesting story but, I think your right the weapons were old and use less.

I'm more interested in General Sada's story. That the weapons were flown to Syria.
 
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Yes. Let us all laud CNN for only presenting one side of the story.

Topic:

It may be that 500 is "not very much" but it isn't a bad find in a 437,072 sq km sand pile. I fail to understand how this gets turned around, though. Somehow finding 500 shells of "old" chemicals that are "less dangerous than waste from factories" means that Saddam didn't have WMDs? I may not drive around with a Bush sticker on my car, but I really feel for the guy on this point. They could find an ICBM fueled up on a launch pad in Iraq, and Bush bashers would still claim he lied.
 
Italian Guy said:
Oh is it? News was released this morning... where's the other one?

Humor him IG, good to see you again man. Actually the WMD news broke in 2001 but we let the naysayers shout us down.
 
Well, if Dan Rather, poster boy of the left, hadn't been kicked off the air for blatantly lieing, he could have broke this story.
 
Missileer said:
Well, if Dan Rather, poster boy of the left, hadn't been kicked off the air for blatantly lieing, he could have broke this story.

Rather was canned for reporting a story he later couldnt verify, not for lying. I suspect the story itself is actually true, I mean how does it happen that in 5 person unit, nobody remembers you for a whole year. Mass amnesia? But as much as I despise Bush I wont fault him for this, lots of others ducked out of Vietnam he wasn't the only one. Look at Congress, very few of them actually went to Vietnam, although I do find Bush "War President" strutting highly amusing.

What about Sean Hannity or Bill O'Reilly poster boy of the right? When will FAUX NEWS get around to firing them for all the Fake News Stories these two poop out. And lets not deny this, I could write a bestseller on false, misleading, and distorted statements from these 2 alone but Al Franken already beat me to it.

Still nothing from other mainstream press I checked ABC News, the NYtimes, WSJ, Washington Post, La Times, and USAToday. The story has about as much truth in it as a used car salesmen.
 
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The guy who sold me my used car seemed like a very honest person...heh..But on a serious note, the fact that other press hasn't posted the story doesn't mean its not true...I think moving0target is spot on. Bush bashers would jump on his back if they caught Osama Bin Ladin alive. They could fine thousands of WMDs and ICBMs and STILL think it was appropriate to say that Bush mislead the country...The fact is, the WMD news is old news. This is a declassified report, meaning that the news was fresh back in '01...We are just finding out about it..I dont know why, but we are. So think back to 2001. When the war was just starting...Do you think this would have changed the support a little? Of course it would have. Bush would have huge support because he had confirmed the WMDs over there. I have no idea why he chose to hold the info...but for whatever reason, he did.
 
So Bush dodged the war by joining the Guard and Clinton dodged the war by fleeing to Canada yet somehow Bush is the greater of the two traitors, hmm, something is really :cen:ed up here.
 
Henderson

If you checked the list I mentioned there were a few right wing papers as well like the WSJ. The WSJ is a huge Bush backer, they have nothing on this. Even the most anti-Bush paper wouldnt cover up a story so big, they didnt cover up when they killed Zarquiwi or when Saddam was captured did they? I found about both on CNN breaking news. It was all over the headlines. Nor is this the first time that they have discovered left over WMDs from Iran-Iraq. And like this article those shells where in the same non-usable state as these were. So there is absolutly nothing at all to this story, its a regurgitation of 3 year old news. Things must really be bad if this is the best FOX can do.

MovingTarget

This war was sold on the fact that Saddam had a weapons PROGRAM. A program means that he was researching and producing WMDs. There BS line we were fed was that he was going to use this non-existant program to do all sorts of ill gotten deeds such as attack his neighbors, attack Europe, even attack the US. A few old unusable shells from 30 years ago doesnt qualify as weapons program, its simply junk. What Fox News is trying to do is blur the line between a actual program and a few relics that were most likely buried and forgotten about. Saddam disposed of lots of his chemicals in this fashion, this is not the first time a cache has been discovered.

Damien

I never said that, reread what I posted. In the 1960's the Guard was a way one avoided being sent to Vietnam. Times have changed since then. And if you want to compare Clinton and Bush on this issue they are equally guilty. Thats why I said "I don't fault Bush on this".
 
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And now that we have solved that problem (Guard being a way out of actually having to do anything.) we have opened up a much larger can of worms from those who say that the Guard should not actually be used, especially not in war.
 
Soon,Liberal may call WMD as Worst Military Demonstration.
OK.
I'll bet 100 dollars on their raising scheme theory of CIA.
 
Damien435 said:
And now that we have solved that problem (Guard being a way out of actually having to do anything.) we have opened up a much larger can of worms from those who say that the Guard should not actually be used, especially not in war.

True, but I happen to agree with that. I think the Guard shouldnt be used in combat except in thr case of a National Emergency. The Guards absence during KATRINA was particularily noticable.
 
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