500 pieces of WMD were found in Iraq, What are the lefties going to do? How will they spin this one?
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.
[…]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.”
No way to spin this one folks….try as they might. Here is the .pdf of the letter from Negroponte to Santorum which started this whole thing.
Are these the 500 that Iraq had already told the world they destroyed?
Iraq declared that some 28,500 chemical munitions remained unused as of January 1991; about 5,500 filled munitions were destroyed by coalition forces during the war in 1991, while another 500 filled munitions were declared destroyed unilaterally by Iraq. “These last two figures were partially verified by United Nations inspectors,” the report states.
Yeah, verified.
A poster at FR has done the math:
Let’s see…assuming each projectile is equivalent to a 155-mm GB (Sarin) round uploaded with 6.5 pounds of GB, that would be approximately 1477 kg (1.6 tons) of GB Agent. The LD50 for Sarin is about 100 mg percutaneous per 70 kg man, for a total of 14,770,000 lethal doses to the skin, at 50% fatality. That’s more than enough Sarin to kill 7,385,000 people, or the population of Los Angeles, Chicago AND Houston.
But he was never a threat…./sarcasm The left will say “but it’s old stuff”. The thing they don’t understand is that Mustard gas degrades quite slowly, they would be still be lethal after 15-20 years.
Another interesting factoid is why this was kept secret? (via A Real Ugly American)
General Tom Mcinerney is reporting on Fox Hannity and Colmes right now that that the administration has been keeping this low profile to avoid exposing 3 of the 5 members of the UN Security council; Russia, China, and France. McInerney says these weapons will be traced to these countries, and asserts it is well known that Russia helped Saddam move most of his WMD stockpiles out of Iraq before the war.
Regular readers will not be surprised about this information since much of the translated Saddam documents have said the same thing.
One of the reasons why we invaded Iraq is because Saddam refused to allow inspectors in, now we know why. The lefties may try to say that Karl Rove planted them, hell Murtha will be the first one out the block to tell the world the Marines planted them for Karl but those kind of folks are easily ignored.
What cannot be ignored is that these are WMD’s! WMD’s that Saddam had stated he destroyed.
John Fund is wondering how the Democrats will react:
one wonders how Democrats would react if real evidence of weapons of mass destruction, say the discovery of chemical weapon shells, surfaced. Would they step back and re-evaluate their assumptions, or would they accuse the Bush administration of planting the evidence as part of a Karl Rove-inspired pre-election dirty trick? Far from politics ending at the water’s edge, today’s partisan battles seem to take on added ferocity when they concern foreign policy.
[…]Let’s examine the three assumptions critics of Mr. Bush’s Iraq policy make:
Bush lied about Saddam being a threat. Both the bipartisan Senate Intelligence Committee and the independent Silberman-Robb Commission found not one case in which Bush officials, quoting the Senate committee, “attempted to coerce, influence or pressure analysts to change their judgments related to Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction capabilities.” Recall that both the French and German intelligence agencies also believed Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction.
Just two months before the war, the Los Angeles Times reported that chief U.N. weapons inspector Hans Blix “disclosed troubling new details about Iraq’s weapons programs and expressed frustration with what he described as Baghdad’s refusal to resolve long-standing questions about efforts to produce biological and chemical weapons, as well as long-range missiles.” Mr. Blix later told reporters that in his gut he felt that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction.
[…]There were no Weapons of Mass Destruction in Iraq. Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada rose during last week’s debate to declare, “There are two things that don’t exist in Iraq: cutting and running, and weapons of mass destruction.” Not everyone shares his certitude.
The Iraq Survey Group, an investigative commission set up by President Bush to look at the WMD issue, released its last public report in October 2004. While it found no evidence of WMD inside Iraq, it reported that Saddam was preparing to reconstitute his WMD program “as resources became available and the constraints of sanctions decayed.” According to the report, Saddam had the capability to start anthrax production within one week of making the decision to do so, and thereafter to produce more than 10 tons of weaponized anthrax a year. The congressional Office of Technology Assessment estimates that if even 200 pounds, or 1% of that amount, were released into the air over Washington, up to three million people would die.
[…]No progress is being made in Iraq. Rep. Jack Murtha, the leading Democratic advocate of immediate withdrawal, is convinced that “we can’t win this militarily.” He told CNN last week that “we’ve been there three years longer than World War I, we’ve been longer than the Korean War and almost as long as the war in Europe.” He expressed frustration that “we can’t get [the president] to change direction. . . . In Beirut, President Reagan changed direction. In Somalia, President Clinton changed direction.”
Most terrorism experts are agreed that the precipitous withdrawal from both places emboldened our enemies by convincing them the U.S. could always be made to back down in any conflict. Not repeating those mistakes may be reason enough to stay the course in Iraq. But Mr. Bush has other reasons.
Documents found on the computer owned by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi show he was increasingly concerned about the “bleak situation” the insurgency he led faced. “Time is beginning to be of service to the U.S. forces by allowing them to form and bolster the [Iraqi] National Guard, undertake big arrest operations, carry out a media campaign weakening the resistance’s influence and presenting it as harmful to the people, [and] creat[ing] division among its ranks.” He concluded by saying that the best way “to get out of this crisis is to entangle the American forces into another war. . . . We have noticed that the best of these wars is the one between the Americans and Iran.”
The Zaraqwi document sure sounds like progress, an impression buttressed by the admission of an al Qaeda leader last week that his death was a grave blow to the insurgency.
Never forget what these folks once said:
- “Iraq is a long way from [here], but what happens there matters a great deal here. For the risks that the leaders of a rogue state will use nuclear, chemical or biological weapons against us or our allies is the greatest security threat we face.” – Madeline Albright, Feb 18, 1998
- “[W]e urge you, after consulting with Congress, and consistent with the US Constitution and laws, to take necessary actions (including, if appropriate, air and missile strikes on suspect Iraqi sites) to respond effectively to the threat posed by Iraq’s refusal to end its weapons of mass destruction programs.” – Letter to President Clinton, signed by Sense. Carl Levin, Tom Daschle, John Kerry, and others Oct. 9, 1998
- “Saddam Hussein has been engaged in the development of weapons of mass destruction technology which is a threat to countries in the region and he has made a mockery of the weapons inspection process.” – Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D, CA), Dec. 16, 1998
- “Hussein has chosen to spend his money on building weapons of mass destruction and palaces for his cronies.” – Madeline Albright, Clinton Secretary of State, Nov. 10, 1999
- “We know that he has stored secret supplies of biological and chemical weapons throughout his country.” – Al Gore, Sept. 23, 2002
- “Iraq’s search for weapons of mass destruction has proven impossible to deter and we should assume that it will continue for as long as Saddam is in power.” – Al Gore, Sept. 23, 2002
- “We have known for many years that Saddam Hussein is seeking and developing weapons of mass destruction.” – Sen. Ted Kennedy (D, MA), Sept. 27, 2002
- “I will be voting to give the President of the United States the authority to use force– if necessary– to disarm Saddam Hussein because I believe that a deadly arsenal of weapons of mass destruction in his hands is a real and grave threat to our security.” – Sen. John F. Kerry (D, MA), Oct. 9, 2002
But now they sing a different tune. How long can they keep this up?
UPDATE
Hugh Hewitt’s interview with Santorum is up at Radio Blogger. Here is a few snippets:
HH: Now Senator, is it your impression that the classified nature of this material is in place in order to protect the information that might assist insurgents from finding additional stockpiles? Is that…
RS: There’s certainly…that is clearly an element, and there are certainly parts of this report that were not released that should not be released. And that would certainly be one element of it. But there are other elements that I think can be released that could shed more light as to the volume of the problem that we’re confronting, or that we confronted in the sense that how many chemical weapons did Saddam Hussein have prior to the Gulf War, the second Gulf War.
HH: Now you were joined by Congressman Hoekstra, who’s the chair of the permanent intelligence committee in the House…
RS: Right.
HH: …and you’re the chairman of the Senate Republican Conference. Is there any doubt in your mind that a fair-minded observer of the material you’ve had a right to see would conclude there is a serious threat of additional WMD as yet unsecured in Iraq?
RS: I think most people would look at this as a serious threat, and most people would look at this as saying that anybody who would claim that Saddam Hussein did not have weapons of mass destruction prior to the second Gulf War would not be taking a fair look at this situation as it is.
HH: Have you approached any of your colleagues from the other side of the aisle, Senator Rockefeller comes to mind, and ask them in the interest of national security to confirm your assessment?
RS: In fact, I just left the floor of the United States Senate, and asked each one of my colleagues to go up and look at it. This is a secret document. This is not a top secret document. This is a document that every member of the United States Senate has access to. And if they want to go upstairs in the Capitol building to look at this document, they can do so tonight.
HH: And did you get any response as you exited the floor? Were there other Senators about?
RS: Well, Senator Boxer was the next speaker, and she didn’t comment at all on what I said. She moved on to another subject.
Big surprise there….Boxer and the Democrats ignoring the news….shocker!
Michael Tanji at Group Intel has a few thoughts:
500 shells isn’t why we went into Iraq, though it is a nice appetizer. Throw in the currently translated DOCEX cachet and more left to come, unanswered questions from people who were on the ground, (and a little insider knowledge) and you begin to wonder just how many indications one needs to call that quacking, webbed-footed, feathered creature walking down the sidewalk a duck . . .
But the left would call it a endangered dictator just trying to mind his own business.
UPDATE II
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!”
Riehl World View isn’t impressed:
I realize 500 is a nice round number. But the fact is, we have been finding WMD in Iraq since May of 2004. It’s been reported, just not emphasized. These are all separate finds below. Has everyone started to believe the MSM spin we’ve been hearing on this? I stopped worrying about finding WMD a long time ago.
He then links to a few stories in the past few years which detailed the OTHER WMD’s we have found.
Squiggler has a few words for the head in the sand liberals:
Listen up! It doesn’t matter one whit whether the 500 chemical weapons found were pre-1991 weapons, it doesn’t matter one whit if they are, in 2006, still viable. You idiots, Saddam Hussein swore he had NO weapons of mass destruction, chemical, biological or nuclear. We went to war for several reasons, not the least was the violation by Saddam of over a dozen UN resolutions. We gave him a final chance before the first bombs dropped to come clean and fess up. What? You think he just forgot that he had 500 shells filled with deadly chemicals. Fifteen of those shells is what it took to kill how many Kurds? Estmates are in the thousands.
UPDATE III
Junkyard Blog whacks this “unnamed” pentagon official trying to poo-poo the whole thing:
Puh-leaze. Here’s an unnamed Pentagon official:
“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.”
Okay, pal, could you kindly show us those weapons too, then? Or are you waiting to declassify those until 2013? Until then, these weapons are fine with me, buddy, and you’ll excuse me if I light up a stogey anyway. As I say below, there are ten thousand voices on the left and the right ready to, ahem, drizzle on this parade and minimize the significance of the ongoing discovery of deadly, illegal weaponry. But this is great news, people. What did you want?
There were, as I saw it, four good reasons for going to war in Iraq–strategic, humanitarian, legal, and WMD-preventive. I’ll spare you an exposition of each of those, but suffice to say for now that President Bush put too many eggs in the WMD basket. The humanitarian case and the UN sanctions/ international law case have been vindicated. The strategic question is still in debate and while I think we were right to risk it going in, it’s still in the air as to how it turns out. But the failure to find WMDs has been treated by the Left and the media and the country’s enemies abroad as the sole reason we invaded, and therefore our failure to find any delegitimated (for them) the entire project. But they don’t have that canard to stand on anymore. They can’t frame the issue that way, but they’ll have to come up with a real debate on long term strategies if they want to protest the war–that is, they will have to, if we don’t let them dodge this story.
We should be talking about this, okay? Let’s make the Left come out and explain again and agian why 500 rounds of sarin and mustard gas artillery ordnance A: aren’t WMD (Hello, Juan Cole?) and B: weren’t a danger to anyone.
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One of the reasons why we invaded Iraq is because Saddam refused to allow inspectors in, now we know why. The lefties may try to say that Karl Rove planted them, hell Murtha will be the first one out the block to tell the world the Marines planted them for Karl but those kind of folks are easily ignored.
See author page
WMD’s was not the only reason we went to war in Iraq and Bush never said it was the only reason…his ties to terrorists, his refusal to comply with the cease fire, his constant attacks on our jets, the fact that he thumbed his nose at the UN over 17 times, AND his possession of WMD’s (as the recent tapes have proven he had):
….in a post 9/11 world none of this could stand taken as a whole. To say otherwise your just being dishonest with yourself to give your hatred for Bush justification (not talking to you Redhand, just the lefties).
I definately feel that the Iraq war was the needed 2nd step and it has done much to further our victory against terrorism.
Plus if we had not invaded he would have completely reconstituted his WMD programs when inspectors left, as Clinton was so afraid he would do:
I hate to say it, but I can kinda see the “unnamed Pentagon official’s” point of view. This conflict was sold to the American people by the Administration with “mushroom cloud over NYC” type rhetoric. The idea was that the “WMD” posed an imminent threat to us. We had to act immediately and preemptively to protect ourselves, etc.
This find doesn’t really match the rhetoric, bad as it is. It looks like local terror munitions designed for killing Kurds and Iranians. As we know, Saddam used this stuff against both groups.
Of course he was obliged to destroy it, and didn’t, but would we have gone to war just for this? Frankly, I doubt it.
Then there’s the Administration’s curious de-emphasis on the find. Why the hell was this info classified to begin with? If it was that important, one would think the Bushies would have seized on it ages ago, to prove that the WMDs existed all along.
So, I consider the find interesting, but not a standalone justification for this conflict.
While I’m very right of center in my views, I’m still not convinced that Iraq was the essential second step we needed to take in the GWOT. I would have been much happier had we directed most of our energies into killing bin Laden and intimidating those sick Mullah F*cks in Iran (who do have a covert nuclear weaapons program up and running).
Of course, now that we’re in so deeply in Iraq, we have no choice but to see it through. The cut-and-run Democrats nausiate me.
Curt,
Please check out this article by Rick Moran, which says it all about the Democrats and the mess they just made of themselves over the Iraq War Resolution(s). It is a brilliant analysis!
http://rightwingnuthouse.com/archives/2006/06/22/democrats-go-out-with-a-whimper-on-iraq/
Eh hem…but then, so are you guys…brilliant that is! Sheez. Am I in trouble now?!
Just sayin’
Carol
Talk about total denial. Surf over to Huff&Puff and ready the comedy. They’re as bad as Kos after getting caught with his hand in the political money cookie jar. Don’t like our canidiate, we’ll pay you to support him. Kind of smells like the entire dim-wit bunch and their lack of morals doesn’t it?
I’m of a similar mindset as Riehl World View. It hasn’t been that important to me and there have been reports of wmds for the past few years, if not the stockpiles we thought Saddam probably had at his disposal. At this point, it’s a moot point. Saddam was a danger, we had all the legal and moral authority we needed, and we’re there now, so deal with it.
And to zenseless and the libs trackbacking to this, the Iraqi War Resolution from 2002 specified nothing on the production dates of those wmds.
Sorry to harsh your high, folks, but
The lawmakers [Santorum and Hoekstra] pointed
to an unclassified summary from a report by the
National Ground Intelligence Center regarding
500 chemical munitions shells that had been
buried near the Iranian border, and then long
forgotten, by Iraqi troops during their eight-year war with Iran, which ended in 1988.
This shells were there when Saddam was STILL OUR FRIEND (they were then when Rummy was shaking his hand). So even if they fell into the wrong hands they are utterly useless. You could roll in that sarin and it would do nothing to you. So fantasize all you want, but this is utterly worthless, it porves nothing except Santorum is a desperate fraud
“Didn’t The Democrats Say There Was No WMD?”
Yes they did.
But that turned out to be a lie, just like everything else they said…
Squiggler has an important point that is always skipped over by the left. We gave Saddam a peaceful and honorable way out without war. HE is the one that chose war. In fact, I honestly think that the reason we weren’t as prepared for “winning the peace” as we were for “winning the war” was that we really expected Saddam to take the peaceful option. We didn’t really expect to have to “win the peace” or thought we would blow that bridge when we got to it.
Betwen the lines in the interview with Hewitt is a message that there is more, maybe lots more than hasn’t been located and some recently translated documents seem to back that possibility up.
American Conservative Daily
Trackback
The Old Liberal Mind Trick ?These Aren?t The WMD?s You Are Looking For?…
You can never catch liberals, wrapped up in hatred for America, in a lie. Not because they don?t lie; they do that more often than Imelda Marcos buys shoes! But rather because they simply either claim that what they said was not what they said or that…