On Sun, 12 Oct 2003 06:33:27 GMT, Gunner wrote:
On Sun, 12 Oct 2003 01:33:28 -0400, Gary Coffman
wrote:

On Sat, 11 Oct 2003 23:57:20 GMT, Gunner wrote:
Have you read the David Kay 3 month interim report yet that was
released recently? I suggest you do so.

It might be helpful if you read the full text, *carefully*. What it admits
is that not even one liter of nerve gas has been found. It says not a
milliliter of bioweaponry has been found. And it provides no evidence
at all, zero, of any ongoing nuclear materials enrichment. This despite
claims by Bush in the build up to invasion that Iraq had *stockpiles*
of nerve gas, bioweapons, and was within months of producing
nuclear weapons.

BTW, a nuclear material enrichment plant is basically impossible
to hide. Ever been to Oak Ridge? It takes *huge* amounts of
electricity to run an enrichment facility. That's why Oak Ridge
was located next to TVA. You can't hide something like that
for even a week from both aerial surveillance and ground truth
inspections. Basically, all you have to do is follow the heaviest
power lines to find it. Iraq doesn't have any facility with that
sort of electrical power feeding it.

Even civilian satellites like SPOT (imagery available via
Terraserver) are sufficient to spot something like that.
We don't need to depend on what politicians or their
toadys claim, we can look for ourselves.

Gary

Correct. Nothing has been found. But the report also mentions that
they have paperwork up the ass on ongoing projects, scientists whom
have worked on it, yada yada yada. And they have only visited a very
small fraction of the 130 or so muntions dumps.

"Who", not "whom". :-)

We also have the testimony of former Iraqi officials that there was
an enormous amount of skimming going on. Like most 2nd and 3rd
world countries, Iraq has more than its share of corrupt government
employees capable of dummying up paperwork to get paid for doing
nothing.

The evidence at hand still points to them having it, or having had WMD
in some quantities, and the programs continued for long after the
inspectors had gone, and there were very organized efforts to hide the
stuff, compartmentalize like crazy, etc etc.

There's no question that they had chemical weapons prior to 1991.
However, there is no credible evidence that they did not destroy
their stockpiles. In fact there is eyewitness testimony from former
Iraqi servicemen that they did take stocks of chemical munitions
out into the desert and detonate them. All the paperwork on that
may not have been done to a bureaucrat's satisfaction, however,
because few Iraqi enlisted personnel have a bureaucrat's fetish
for doing paperwork.

Shrug..so the jury is STILL out and is likely to be for some time. You
will note again that fairly recently stockpiles of US NBC agents were
found, locked securely away in US munitions dumps, some 300 tons of
the stuff, during several intensive military self audits. If the stuff
can remain hidden that long in our own basements....

Then there may be some forgotten chemical stocks in Iraq. I agree
that's possible. As I said, they didn't keep very good records. If the
paperwork crazy US Army can lose stockpiles, it is certainly possible
that some of that could have happened in Iraq too. That's very different
from what the Bush administration was claiming prior to the invasion,
however.

Gary