At 08:21 PM 5/18/2004 -0700 Gautam Mukunda wrote >I don't know, it's just possible that the fact that >the Iraqis _actually had chemical weapons_ is little >more significant. Or is that not important?
I have no way of judging this blogger's credibility, but here is certainly an interesting take on it..... http://www.overpressure.com/archives/week_2004_05_16.html#23000816 <http://www.overpressure.com/archives/week_2004_05_16.html#23000816> It's Huge News The discovery of a chemical round in Iraq is getting some small amount of coverage. It is just a single round. Did we invade Iraq for one artillery shell? No, of course not. However, this is still a tremendous revelation, because of conclusions not yet drawn from what has been reported. This is what BG Kimmit had to say about the round that was found: The Iraqi Survey Group confirmed today that a 155-millimeter artillery round containing sarin nerve agent had been found. The round had been rigged as an IED, which was discovered by a U.S. force convoy. A detonation occurred before the IED could be rendered inoperable. This produced a very small dispersal of agent. The round was an old binary type requiring the mixing of two chemical components in separate sections of the cell before the deadly agent is produced. The cell is designed to work after being fired from an artillery piece. Mixing and dispersal of the agent from such a projectile as an IED is very limited. The former regime had declared all such rounds destroyed before the 1991 Gulf War. Two explosive ordnance team members were minor exposure to nerve agent as a result of the partial detonation of the round. What BG Kimmit is describing is a "mix in flight" binary round. While he says that the Iraqs had declared all such rounds destroyed prior to the 1991 Gulf War, that isn't entirely true. The truth is the Iraqis said they [i]never[/i] had such rounds. The Iraqis never claimed to have them. The United States never thought they had the capability <http://www.alternet.org/story.html?StoryID=15854> : The U.S. Defense Department's "Militarily Critical Technologies List" (MCTL) is "a detailed compendium of technologies" that the department advocates as "critical to maintaining superior US military capabilities. It applies to all mission areas, especially counter-proliferation." Written in 1998, it was recently re-published with updates for 2002. .... There was some talk shortly before the first Gulf War that the Iraqis had been creating binary chemical weapons, in which the relatively non-toxic ingredients of the agent remain unmixed until just before the weapon is used; this allows the user to bypass any worry about shelf life or toxicity. But according to the MCTL , "The Iraqis had a small number of bastardized binary munitions in which some unfortunate individual was to pour one ingredient into the other from a Jerry can prior to use" - an action few soldiers were willing to perform. Note that the referenced article is from Alternet, and it is saying that the US, Ritter, and the UN "knew" that there was no binary weapons capability in Iraq. We know that they didn't have these prior to the Gulf War, and the UN says that they never developed or weaponized any WMD after the Gulf War, under the inspection regime. So where did this round come from? If it is Iraqi, it is certainly a new development - right under the noses of the UN inspectors. It is not an old round from the Iran-Iraq war, or from shelling of Kurds or Shi'ites after the Gulf War. And this is not the sort of thing that someone put a single one together in the lab - it came off of a production line somewhere. Even more troubling, if it isn't Iraqi, where did it come from? If it came from another country, then certainly the people who planted the IED knew what was in it. This is huge, HUGE news.
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