[thuh Freak]

confirmed

what's this gonna mean... for all the people... who said things.. about the stuff?

[thegelding]

COMPREHENSIVE testing has confirmed that a 155mm artillery shell discovered in Iraq earlier this month contained the deadly nerve agent sarin, a Pentagon spokesman said today.


a shell?? how old??? made by what country?

we went to war and killed thousands for "a shell"??

g

[billybobsky]

the chain of evidence on this shell is sort of broken...

i mean our soliders found it on a road side set up as a mine... obviously not its intended purpose... and again, no one ever claimed saddam didn't at one point have sarin... we know that... but a half-failed shell does not constitute a weapons program... nor does it even indicate that one existed at the moment we went to war...

[SKMDC]

it was probably fairly old, and the people that used it probably didn't know it was sarin or they'd have used it more intelligently. (inside in a closed area, like that crazy japanese guy did in a subway, killing 12)

[Moogs]

Oh they found a shell? Wow I feel much better about everything now. Any chance they might find something approaching the definition of a "stockpile"... you know... 8, 10... 20 shells? Maybe something like that isn't asking for too much in order to justify a fekking war?

[dmz]

muummmffff....burble.....burble.....

*comes up into the inner lagoon, a la The Beach*

WOW!! They're really is an alternate universe!!


....anyway, the bad guys got WMD somehow, let's find out how before the knuckleheads figure out how to use those types of weapons effctively.

[Chinney]

Originally Posted by dmz [...] ....anyway, the bad guys got WMD somehow, let's find out how before the knuckleheads figure out how to use those types of weapons effctively.

Let's hope that they don't. But this is not making me shake in my boots. There is nothing indicating that those who used it even knew what it was.

[Argento]

Yeah dude this is pretty weak evidence to say that "WMD are found." A shell is a....decent start, but as I recal I'm looking for a stock pile, arsenal, something that can "Hurt us."

[DMBand0026]

Originally Posted by Argento Yeah dude this is pretty weak evidence to say that "WMD are found." A shell is a....decent start, but as I recal I'm looking for a stock pile, arsenal, something that can "Hurt us."

Something that can hurt us...Saddam Hussain? Good enough for you?
That dude is crazy, I don't even care if they had the WMD now, I think it's awesome that he's out of power and that Iraq will be a free nation within a few months, with its own government. The world is now a better and safer place because of this war.

[curiousuburb]

Originally Posted by dmz ....anyway, the bad guys got WMD somehow, let's find out how before the knuckleheads figure out how to use those types of weapons effctively.

oo... oo... *waves hand*

Maybe we could ask the Friendly Neighbourhood Nuclear Proliferator in Osama's backyard... who publicly admitted (no pesky inspectors required) selling the king-daddy WMD technology... we're talking full frontal uranium/plutonium action... not just dirty... it's The Bomb.

Strangely, despite US troops in-country at the time, and a significant international force next door... and despite plenty of smoke being blown buttwards over a certain SH and potential proliferation as a just cause for war... Dr Khan gets pardoned by the Coup leader^y^y^y^y^y^y uh, Head of his country.

It has turned out that the supplier of essential information and technology for North Korea's uranium program was America's faithful ally in the war on terrorism, Pakistan, which received missile technology from Korea in return. The "father" of Pakistan's bomb, Ayub Qadeer Khan, has visited North Korea thirteen times. This is the same Pakistan whose nuclear scientist Sultan Bashiruddin Mahood paid a visit to Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan a few months before September 11, and whose nuclear establishment even today is riddled with Islamic fundamentalists. . . . Indeed, an objective ranking of nuclear proliferators in order of menace would place Pakistan (a possessor of the bomb that also purveys the technology to others) first on the list, North Korea second (it peddles missiles but not, so far, bomb technology), Iran (a country of growing political and military power with an active nuclear program) third, and Iraq (a country of shrinking military power that probably has no nuclear program and is currently under international sanctions and an unprecedented inspection regime of indefinite duration) fourth. (Russia, possessor of 150 tons of poorly guarded plutonium, also belongs somewhere on this list.) The Bush Administration ranks them, of course, in exactly the reverse order, placing Iraq, which it plans to attack, first, and Pakistan, which it befriends and coddles, nowhere on the list. from here in early 2003

AQ Khan...

[Wrao]

Originally Posted by DMBand0026 Something that can hurt us...Saddam Hussain? Good enough for you?

Saddam was not a threat to us at all.

[DMBand0026]

Originally Posted by Wrao Saddam was not a threat to us at all.

Care to explain your reasoning behind your statement?

[Wrao]

Originally Posted by DMBand0026 Care to explain your reasoning behind your statement?

I read This

I encourage you to read it, but here are some relevant quotes

Originally Posted by General Zinni We built a magnificent coalition of forces, without ever once signing a piece of paper. And we contained Saddam. We watched his military shrink to less than half its size from the beginning of the Gulf War until the time I left command, not only shrinking in size, but dealing with obsolete equipment, ill-trained troops, dissatisfaction in the ranks, a lot of absenteeism.? We didn't see the Iraqis as a formidable force. We saw them as a decaying force.

re:any weapons he did have(possibly in hiding) And if he had to bring them out and use them, think about this, he's got to move them to artillery positions, to battery positions, under total dominance of the air by the United States. I sure as hell wouldn't have been ... want to be that battery commander that said tomorrow you're going to get five truckloads of chemical weapons to be stored in your area to shoot.

We bombed him almost at will. No one in the region felt threatened by Saddam

he's referring of course to military operations and military presence, I can't speak for iraqi civilians, I'm sure Saddam was a threat to them, but he was not a threat to us.

I should also note, this one seminar isn't the only thing I've read or heard, but it's the most recent, and from probably the most concise and credible source.

[NosferaDrew]

Originally Posted by DMBand0026 Care to explain your reasoning behind your statement?

You're not one of those people who actually think that Iraq had anything to do with 9/11 are you?

No one in the Administration does:

ON THE ASSUMPTION that America is thoroughly brainwashed, President Bush said with no hint of shame, "We've had no evidence that Saddam Hussein was involved in September the 11th." National Security adviser Condoleezza Rice said, "We have never claimed that Saddam Hussein had either . . . direction or control of 9/11." Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said, "I've not seen any indication that would lead me to believe I could say" that Saddam Hussein was tied to the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

Full atricle here

Saddam was in a box. He was a horrible leader who mistreated his own people, but he was zero threat to us.

[NosferaDrew]

Originally Posted by DMBand0026 Something that can hurt us...Saddam Hussain? Good enough for you? That dude is crazy, I don't even care if they had the WMD now, I think it's awesome that he's out of power and that Iraq will be a free nation within a few months, with its own government. The world is now a better and safer place because of this war.

If you think that Iraq will be "free within a few months" you're deluded.
We're going to have to have troops there for years and years just to keep it from falling into chaos and civil war.

It's a mess. A mess we should've never been a part of.

[chucker]

Originally Posted by DMBand0026 Something that can hurt us...Saddam Hussain? Good enough for you?

You're saying that, when a nation consider's another nation's chief of government a "thread", they are allowed to go to war with them and imprison that chief?

Okay, let's go to North Korea now.

How about the United States next? They have, after all, a lot of political and economical control over the rest of the world - oh, and they have WMDs, woohoo!

(P.S.: "WMD" is not a person owning something. Don't put an apostrophe after it, or your former English teachers shall smack you.)

[thuh Freak]

Originally Posted by chucker (P.S.: "WMD" is not a person owning something. Don't put an apostrophe after it, or your former English teachers shall smack you.)

i seem to remember (perhaps my memory is flawed, or maybe i made this all up on my own) that you are supposed to use an apostraphe when dealing with the plurality of an acronym, lest one should think the 's' is part of the acronym.

[chucker]

Originally Posted by thuh Freak i seem to remember (perhaps my memory is flawed, or maybe i made this all up on my own) that you are supposed to use an apostraphe when dealing with the plurality of an acronym, lest one should think the 's' is part of the acronym.

It's commonly done, but I'm pretty sure that's a misconception. For abbreviations, however, you would use it.

Of course, feel free to correct me. Putting an apostrophe after an acronym looks seriously wrong to me, though.

[Chinney]

Originally Posted by DMBand0026 [...] The world is now a better and safer place because of this war.

Iraq war revitalized al-Qaeda

[Luca]

I really wish we had hunted down and killed every member of Al Qaeda and truly crushed the Taliban, putting a democratic government in place in Afghanistan, BEFORE dropping everything and attacking Iraq. I don't exactly see how attacking Iraq helped us fight terrorism. We certainly did fight a corrupt government and bring them down, but Iraq is not related to the real threat, which is the terrorists. And their leader is still out there. What if Osama bin Laden assembles a few men and attacks us again? Bush would crash and burn for failing so completely in his task of protecting the US, and people would finally see that the entire Iraq war, which over 800 Americans have died for at this point, is a lie.

[torifile]

Originally Posted by DMBand0026 Something that can hurt us...Saddam Hussain? Good enough for you? That dude is crazy, I don't even care if they had the WMD now, I think it's awesome that he's out of power and that Iraq will be a free nation within a few months, with its own government. The world is now a better and safer place because of this war.

You've bought the admin's assertions without thinking for yourself. This is the problem I have with people who unthinkingly support one party or another.

There are republicans I respect. McCain, for example. There are republicans I don't. Inhofe, for starters. DMBand, you're on the Inhofe side of the tracks until you show you have reason to believe what you stated above.

[Argento]

Originally Posted by DMBand0026 Something that can hurt us...Saddam Hussain? Good enough for you? That dude is crazy, I don't even care if they had the WMD now, I think it's awesome that he's out of power and that Iraq will be a free nation within a few months, with its own government. The world is now a better and safer place because of this war.

How is he going to hurt us? Bomb Israel? Well that's about it and Iraq is only one of the MANY problems facing Israel. What about all the other repressed people around the world, why shouldn't we be saving their asses? Ever visited any of the governments in Africa? Because they are the worst yet.