At 08:28 AM 3/26/03 -0800, Major Variola (ret) wrote:At 06:12 PM 3/25/03 -0500, John Kelsey wrote:...>Maybe the FBI caught them and disarmed the >bombs before they went off.
And they didn't claim any credit? This doesn't jibe with the puffery one observes.
Well, there's puffery, and then there's trying to avoid panic. Though I'll agree this looks less plausible after the "all Americans should have duct tape and plastic to wrap their houses" announcements. But I'm trying to imagine the fallout (sorry) from announcing on CNN that they'd just found and disarmed a nuke that had been hidden in an apartment building in Manhattan. ("Officials said the bomb, which had approximately the same destructive power as the one used at Hiroshima, would have killed more than a million people if set off. In related news, the 200-mile-long traffic jam caused by refugees flooding out of the city continued today, and the NYSE announced that they would be moving operations to an undisclosed location in New Jersey for the forseeable future.")
This is a very good analysis. I had not considered that some WMDs might have been discovered and dealt with, but then not publicized for the reasons you describe.
However, it seems to me it would be very hard for this news not to leak out. If, say, a nuke or serious bioterror weapon had been found in a major city, a lot of agencies would have had knowledge of it. It seems to me that at least one person would have said something, leaked it to the press, etc., for any of the usual reasons.
Such a thing could probably be kept secret for a few days, but not for months, it seems to me.
Still, in this Orwellian era where the invasion of Iraq is called "Operation Iraqi Freedom," where the fact that the U.N. and most countries oppose this invasion results in "the Coalition of the Willing," and where other doublespeak is rampant, I suppose the authorities will do what they can to not scare the sheeple.
Rumsfield is "promising" that the reasons for the invasion--Iraq's banned weapons--will still be found. So far, they haven't been, not in any of the regions yet invaded, and with no signs of them being used...the rockets launched at COW and COWait have been Al-Fatah missile, which were not banned. I don't doubt that there are probably some undestroyed missiles or even some chemical agents somewhere in a country as large as Iraq...bookkeeping errors alone would probably guarantee this. But it is so far looking like the U.S. will have some serious explaining to do if stockpiles of banned weapons are not found. The DOD and CIA are probably creating them right now.
--Tim May, Occupied America
"They that give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety." -- Benjamin Franklin, 1759.
