> -----Original Message----- > From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On > Behalf Of Nick Arnett > Sent: Friday, August 04, 2006 7:45 PM > To: Killer Bs Discussion > Subject: Re: RFK Jr. interview > > On 8/4/06, Dan Minette <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > > > > > It is in the first Key Judgment on page 5 of the report (page 9 in > > Acrobat). > > The first two sentences read: > > > > "We judge that Iraq has continued its weapons of mass destruction (WMD) > > program in defiance of the 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 > > weapons > > program." > > > A program is not a weapon, just a plan to get rich is not money. You're > reading it the way you want to, not using the meanings it makes clear. Do > realize how very, very carefully they pick the language in these reports? > Who and how many people review it (which actually is classified)? Where > it says "weapons," if it mean "weapons of mass destruction," it would have > said so. Maybe you think this is nitpicking... but this is > an intelligence brief for the president and security council, they are > very, very precise in what they say. If they weren't, then how would the > consumers of the report know when they are talking about ordinary weapons, > which Iraq certainly had, and WMDs?
_By definition_ chemical and biological weapons are WMD. Yes they are careful in what they write, but they do not anticipate a defense lawyer trying to explain a totally different meaning to a jury from the one intended. The common use of the term MWD, as well as the prevalent use by the Administration is the grouping of biological, chemical, and nuclear weapons. When the administration has deviated from this, it is by extending the definition to other forms of mass destruction. For example, the planes that hit the WTC and Pentagon were called, by some, WMD. Another example of a more consistent extension of WMD is the extension to the use of radiological weapons (e.g. a conventional bomb covered with Cs-137. So, while all WMD may not be biological, chemical, or nuclear weapons; all biological chemical or nuclear weapons are WMD. Thus, saying biological WMD weapons is redundant. The other lawyerly hair splitting that you did is to distinguish between massive supplies of things like sarin gas, and sarin gas weapons. For this distinction to be a valid one, one of two things has to be true. 1) There is another, legitimate reason for a country to have massive quantities of sarin gas besides having it ready for an attack. It is true that some materials that can be weaponized also has legitimate use. One good example of this comes from home grown terrorism: Oklahoma city. If a farmer has massive quantities of fuel oil and nitrogen fertilizer stored on his property, he probably has a very good reason for this. The fuel oil is for his diesel tractor, while the fertilizer is for his crops. Possession of these materials is not suspicious in his case. If a bunch of neo-Nazis have hundreds of pounds of fertilizer and barrels of fuel oil in a basement, it is very suspicious. They have no good reason to have these. Thus, further investigation is warranted. 2) The development of the delivery system is a significant problem, apart from the development of the active agent. The only example I can think of is the effort required to develop an atomic bomb, once one has the requisite number of kilos of enriched uranium or plutonium. With chemical and biological weapons, this is not the case. IIRC, the WMD attack on the Kurds involved the spraying of the villages from helicopters. Something akin to a simple crop duster is a sufficient delivery mechanism. With a couple of weeks, given a very simple machine shop and a charge card good at Home Depot, I could personally put together something that would work. A more efficient way of doing this from a distance would be missiles or artillery shells. The report noted that Hussein did have a number of these shells found earlier. Other shells, IIRC, were not properly accounted for. Even if he had none on hand, the ability to fill a rocket or a shell with high pressure gas or anthrax powder is fairly straightforward. I probably wouldn't want to do it myself, but there are machine shops I could have a rush order done in a week or so that I know of. > > Even if you stretch the implications of the intelligence as much as you > would, then it still doesn't present a foundation for what the > administration said to justify the war. It's not a matter of stretching the implications. It's a matter of taking the common understanding of the words. Having hundreds of tons of chemical agents, such as mustard gas or sarin, is considered by most to be, by definition, having WMD. I realize that the report didn't state that Iraq had delivery systems, it only pointed out how trivial delivery systems were. >And more to the point of this > thread, it doesn't provide a foundation for all the b.s. that so many > people STILL think was true when we attacked. > > I think that's about enough for me on this. It's bad enough to live with > whatever responsibility I have for this mess. I'm not going to demand > that you take your head out of the sand, but I think that's just where > it is. OK, I'll go on living thinking that someone who has hundreds of tons of sarin gas, mustard gas, tons of anthrax has WMD. I'll go on thinking that someone who has both biological and chemical weapons has WMD. In addition, I bet if you have a poll that asks if possession of ton of anthrax, 10 tons of sarin gas, and 100 tons of mustard gas constitutes possession of WMD, you'd get well in the 90% range saying yes. Out of curiosity, how many people here think that possession of biological and chemical weapons, possession of the vast stockpiles listed above constitute possession of WMD? Dan M. _______________________________________________ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
