WMD FOUND IN IRAQ

[Tom]

NBC news tonight - mobile biological factory found - checked out by fomer UN Inspector who says - there is only one thing this could have been used for. Intelligence expects to find 8 in total.
BTW, this is exactly what Colin Powell described to the UN BEFORE we had to go in and clean house on our own.
So, Amazin, you watchin' tonight? Maybe some of those deaths you seem so quick to pin on MR. Bush might well be attributed
to Jack the Quack Chirrac and old Black Kawfi!
If I were a palestinean terrorist, I would pay attention to what MR. Powell has to say. We are not going to put up with terrorism-anywhere.

[hurrikane]

Hey Tom...I see you're still wearing your winter garb. What's up with that? :cool:

[doophus]

hurricane...

That's Tom's bio/chem protective wear. He needs the protection from ljb's and 'mazin's gaseous warfare.

[Tom]

ROTFLMAO!
GOOD ONE!

Kane- it is STILL winter in western NY - only going to be 45 Tuesday. I got grass 8" high in my back yard - 3" above water, 5" below!
My neighbor is bulding an ark and his wife is collecting pairs of animals! Friday, is was 80 degrees - 40 in the morning and 40 in the afternoon.
That is why Ljb and Amazin don't get to me.....I am used to snow jobs
:rolleyes:

[Dick Schmidt]

Tom,

So now we know what "the military hurry in Iraq" was for.

By the way, you were wrong about the germ labs. I got it straight from Bagdad Bob that they were perfume factories designed to cover the stench of thousands of rotting bodies of
American troops killed by the valiant armed forces of Iraq
U.S. troops have still not entered Bagdad, or even gotten close to it.

Damn, I do miss ol' Bob. Can you imagine the career he could have had doing stand-up in the U.S.? A great loss to comedy and he was such an inspiration to all those who have lost contact with reality.

Dick

[boxcar]

[QUOTE]Originally posted by Dick Schmidt
Tom,

Damn, I do miss ol' Bob. Can you imagine the career he could have had doing stand-up in the U.S.? A great loss to comedy and he was such an inspiration to all those who have lost contact with reality

Judging by the inane drivel of LJB and A-Maze, I'd say that ol' Bob's propaganda is still having lingering effects. Now the U.S. is faced with the daunting task of not only finding cures for AIDS & SARS, but for Triple B Disease, as well (Baghdad Bob's Bull).

Boxcar

[Amazin]

Man,you guys really need a guy like me to give you some fair reporting.There have been alot of possible WMD found in Iraq.But Cnn even reported how this works.There is wide canvassing for WMD.Then they are turned over to specialists,to determine if these are truly WMD.Whenever something remotely gets found it causes a stir and so far nothing has turned up to be real.Maybe you need a new avatar.Once again I have to give you a fact that members here who want to stay in Bushfantasyland despise.Now for the real story.Yes Dick,this is presented as fact because it is:



Published on Sunday, May 11, 2003 by the Washington Post
Frustrated, U.S. Arms Team to Leave Iraq
Task Force Unable To Find Any Weapons

by Barton Gellman

BAGHDAD -- The group directing all known U.S. search efforts for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq is winding down operations without finding proof that President Saddam Hussein kept clandestine stocks of outlawed arms, according to participants.

The 75th Exploitation Task Force, as the group is formally known, has been described from the start as the principal arm of the U.S. plan to discover and display forbidden Iraqi weapons. The group's departure, expected next month, marks a milestone in frustration for a major declared objective of the war.

Leaders of Task Force 75's diverse staff -- biologists, chemists, arms treaty enforcers, nuclear operators, computer and document experts, and special forces troops -- arrived with high hopes of early success. They said they expected to find what Secretary of State Colin L. Powell described at the U.N. Security Council on Feb. 5 -- hundreds of tons of biological and chemical agents, missiles and rockets to deliver the agents, and evidence of an ongoing program to build a nuclear bomb.

Scores of fruitless missions broke that confidence, many task force members said in interviews.

Army Col. Richard McPhee, who will close down the task force next month, said he took seriously U.S. intelligence warnings on the eve of war that Hussein had given "release authority" to subordinates in command of chemical weapons. "We didn't have all these people in [protective] suits" for nothing, he said. But if Iraq thought of using such weapons, "there had to have been something to use. And we haven't found it. . . . Books will be written on that in the intelligence community for a long time."

Army Col. Robert Smith, who leads the site assessment teams from the Defense Threat Reduction Agency, said task force leaders no longer "think we're going to find chemical rounds sitting next to a gun." He added, "That's what we came here for, but we're past that."

Motivated and accomplished in their fields, task force members found themselves missing vital tools. They consistently found targets identified in Washington to be inaccurate, looted and burned, or both. Leaders and members of five of the task force's eight teams, and some senior officers guiding them, said the weapons hunters were going through the motions now to "check the blocks" on a prewar list.

U.S. Central Command began the war with a list of 19 top weapons sites. Only two remain to be searched. Another list enumerated 68 top "non-WMD sites," without known links to special weapons but judged to have the potential to offer clues. Of those, the tally at midweek showed 45 surveyed without success.

Task Force 75's experience, and its impending dissolution after seven weeks in action, square poorly with assertions in Washington that the search has barely begun.

In his declaration of victory aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln on May 1, President Bush said, "We've begun the search for hidden chemical and biological weapons, and already know of hundreds of sites that will be investigated." Stephen A. Cambone, undersecretary of defense for intelligence, told reporters at the Pentagon on Wednesday that U.S. forces had surveyed only 70 of the roughly 600 potential weapons facilities on the "integrated master site list" prepared by U.S. intelligence agencies before the war.

But here on the front lines of the search, the focus is on a smaller number of high-priority sites, and the results are uniformly disappointing, participants said.

"Why are we doing any planned targets?" Army Chief Warrant Officer Richard L. Gonzales, leader of Mobile Exploitation Team Alpha, said in disgust to a colleague during last Sunday's nightly report of weapons sites and survey results. "Answer me that. We know they're empty."

Survey teams have combed laboratories and munitions plants, bunkers and distilleries, bakeries and vaccine factories, file cabinets and holes in the ground where tipsters advised them to dig. Most of the assignments came with classified "target folders" describing U.S. intelligence leads. Others, known as the "ad hocs," came to the task force's attention by way of plausible human sources on the ground.

The hunt will continue under a new Iraq Survey Group, which the Bush administration has said is a larger team. But the organizers are drawing down their weapons staffs for lack of work, and adding expertise for other missions.

Interviews and documents describing the transition from Task Force 75 to the new group show that site survey teams, the advance scouts of the arms search, will reduce from six to two their complement of experts in missile technology and biological, chemical and nuclear weapons. A little-known nuclear special operations group from the Defense Threat Reduction Agency, called the Direct Support Team, has already sent home a third of its original complement, and plans to cut the remaining team by half.

"We thought we would be much more gainfully employed, or intensively employed, than we were," said Navy Cmdr. David Beckett, who directs special nuclear programs for the team.

State-of-the-art biological and chemical labs, shrunk to fit standard cargo containers, came equipped with enough supplies to run thousands of tests using DNA fingerprinting and mass spectrometry. They have been called upon no more than a few dozen times, none with a confirmed hit. The labs' director, who asked not to be identified, said some of his scientists were also going home.

Even the sharpest skeptics do not rule out that the hunt may eventually find evidence of banned weapons. The most significant unknown is what U.S. interrogators are learning from senior Iraqi scientists, military industrial managers and Iraqi government leaders now in custody. If the nonconventional arms exist, some of them ought to know. Publicly, the Bush administration has declined to discuss what the captured Iraqis are saying. In private, U.S. officials provide conflicting reports, with some hinting at important disclosures. Cambone also said U.S. forces have seized "troves of documents" and are "surveying them, triaging them" for clues.

At former presidential palaces in the Baghdad area , where Task Force 75 will soon hand control to the Iraq Study Group, leaders and team members refer to the covert operators as "secret squirrels." If they are making important progress, it has not led to "actionable" targets, according to McPhee and other task force members.

McPhee, an artillery brigade commander from Oklahoma who was assigned to the task force five months ago, reflected on the weapons hunt as the sun set outside his improvised sleeping quarters, a cot and mosquito net set down in the wreckage of a marble palace annex. He smoked a cigar, but without the peace of mind he said the evening ritual usually brings.

"My unit has not found chemical weapons," he said. "That's a fact. And I'm 47 years old, having a birthday in one of Saddam Hussein's palaces on a lake in the middle of Baghdad. It's surreal. The whole thing is surreal.

"Am I convinced that what we did in this fight was viable? I tell you from the bottom of my heart: We stopped Saddam Hussein in his WMD programs," he said, using the abbreviation for weapons of mass destruction. "Do I know where they are? I wish I did . . . but we will find them. Or not. I don't know. I'm being honest here."

Later in the conversation, he flung the unfinished cigar into the lake with somewhat more force than required.

Team members explain their disappointing results, in part, as a consequence of a slow advance. Cautious ground commanders sometimes held weapons hunters away from the front, they said, and the task force had no helicopters of its own.

"My personal feeling is we waited too long and stayed too far back," said Christopher Kowal, an expert in computer forensics who worked for Mobile Exploitation Team Charlie until last week.

'The Bear Wasn't There'

[PaceAdvantage]

So they concluded the bio-weapon mobile lab reported found on many, many news sources yesterday was nothing more than a soup kitchen on wheels?

[Amazin]

I think they made Minestroni soup there.Mmmm said Bush.

When they find something,you wont have to rely on Tom to give you the news.

[PaceAdvantage]

Why must you insult? I do not get my news from Tom.

I am talking about the multiple reports about this mobile bio-lab on Sunday night's (5/11/2003) national news broadcasts, including NBC. The report included an ex-weapons inspector now consulting for NBC news. He said the mobile lab had only one purpose, and that was for making bio-weapons in the field.

If you have news that tests were done on this lab, and these tests rule out bio-weapon evidence, please point me to the source.

[JustRalph]

PA

He doesn't understand that this stuff is like pouring one 5 gallon can of gas into the right mix and Voila' you have chemical Weapons. They probably filled the river full of it. There is also some reports from the CIA that say a bunch of 55 gal drums were buried in Syria two weeks before the war started. Makes you wonder why suddenly Powell had to take a trip to Syria? They won't ever get it. I give up on these lunatics. Pray their type don't get elected anymore.

[Amazin]

That was not an insult,it was a rebuttel.If a significant find on WMD were made,it would be front page everywhere,not just on one TV show.Tom presented it as if the smoking gun were found. If it was believe me,Bush would make sure it was blasted all over every newscast and tabloid in the country so he can prove to all the non believers in the world that he was justified(also for re-election purposes).I did not see that program,but I've been listening to the news and reading the papers today,and I don't see or hear any late breaking news on WMD or Iraq for that matter.

As far as someone saying that the mobile lab had only one purpose,and it was for making bio-weapons,I don't doubt it,but that doesn't prove a thing.Why?Because they've allready found thing like those that are inactive.Iraq claims to have destroyed those WMD shortly after the first gulf war.To have inactive shells and has-been mobile bio-tech equipment is to be expected but not the smoking gun Bush needs.Now my article I posted is dated 5/11.And it shows there has yet to be anything significant found.This is from the U.S.'s own investigative team,not me.Don't know how much more plain this can be.Everyone including Bush concedes this so far.

[so.cal.fan]

During the war, I was watching Fox Report with Sheppard Smith one night, and he had embedded reporter, Rick Leventhal on live from Baghdad. Rick was with a group of marines who found a very large supply of "suicide bomb belts".......all packed and ready to be shipped to terrorists! Rick said they had hundreds and hundreds of them....the cameras showed them to us.
Now.......doesn't anyone think these suicide bomb belts are serious WMD? I sure do......and the fact that Iraq was supplying them to terrorists or planning to......is pretty scary.

By the way........Just Ralph.........you have seriously plagarized our Tom's picture..........that is Tom......NOT YOU!
:rolleyes:

[Dave Schwartz]

>>>that is Tom......NOT YOU!<<<

Easy, S.C.F. control yourself. <G>

[Tom]

Those suits they found were palestinean three-pice suits:
A vest and two sticks of dynamite. :rolleyes:

[Tom]

Originally posted by Dick Schmidt
Tom,

......Damn, I do miss ol' Bob. Can you imagine the career he could have had doing stand-up in the U.S.? A great loss to comedy and he was such an inspiration to all those who have lost contact with reality.

Dick

He could be a super-handicapping software salesman!
"Bob, I am losing money - your program is no good!"
"NOT TRUE. The program picks every winner."
"But I have no money left!"
"YES you do"

[JustRalph]

Originally posted by so.cal.fan
By the way........Just Ralph.........you have seriously plagarized our Tom's picture..........that is Tom......NOT YOU!
:rolleyes:

I was waiting for someone to Notice........ I thought Tom would get a kick out of it.......... I will change it.......immediately.

[so.cal.fan]

Thanks, JR:

I'm sure you are a good looking guy.......but there is:

ONLY ONE TOM!!!!!!!!!:D

[JustRalph]

Originally posted by so.cal.fan
Thanks, JR:I'm sure you are a good looking guy.......but there is:ONLY ONE TOM!!!!!!!!!:D

Don't go jumping to any conclusions now! The current Avatar is pretty Close!

[Tom]

I -KNOW- NUTHING!

[andicap]

Gee Ralph, I have such mixed feelings here. I love your avatar -- (can we start a petition to get TV Land to put Hogan's Heroes back on?) --but your politics,..oh well. we'll just agree to disagree and leave it that.

(BTW, my favorite Sgt. Schultz line is from the first season when he tells Hogan, "In wartime, you have to be flexible!" My wife and I still use that all the time.)

My point on this post is about the media.
Most of the people on this board hate the media, with the exception of Fox. OK, fine. But you can't have it both ways. You cant criticize NBC, CBS, CNN, etc. for airing propaganda and lies and distortion and then quote one of their newscasts to prove your point!
Either they are lying liberal pigs or they are not.
Oh, I get it, they are only lying when they air news that doesn't agree with your point of view! They're OK when they air a report about finding WMD.
Yes, very consistent reasoning there.

My view on the WMD? I don't know to tell you the truth.
These mobile labs are suspicious I will admit, and it is possible Iraq destroyed or moved their WMD before the war. Or it's possible they did not.
My major question is this: with absolutely nothing to lose, why didn't Iraq use any chemical weaponry?? Hussein never showed any restraint before in dealing with his own people or any rebellions -- why start now?

Maybe he made a deal with Syria -- Asylum if he didn't use the weapons or carted them over to Syria. Who knows now.
One thing: I certainly wouldn't take the CIA's take as the last word on this matter: Like they've never lied to the public, before? It's their job!
Syria is definitely more reasonable than Hussein -- harbors terrorism, but isn't really a rogue state like Iraq was. More in the Arab mainstream while the Arabs hated Hussein and are not sorry to see him go.

In fact, the war might have played into the terrorists hands by giving the radical shi'te Muslims a chance to take over or at least gain major influence. But that remains to be seen.

Now really is the time to make peace with Iran, a country with a population that hates its hard-core religious order and has a president who wants detente with the west, but can't shake the authority of the mullahs. There is hope there.

BTW, new poll shows most Americans don't agree with Bush on keeping the UN out of Iraq
http://cbsnews.cbs.com/stories/2003/05/13/opinion/polls/main553679.shtml

an interesting story on the WMD

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/3024359.stm

[Tom]

It is not a case of the media beinglying pigs (except maybe the New York Times, heh,heh, heh).
It is the way some of them pretend to be reporters, ie, that idiot phone-monkee in Miami who sulled the Derby bevasue he is a lazy POS who is looking to crack a big story, truth be damned.
And the the way the report not only the facts, but offer their stupid spin to it. Or choose to leave out many stories/facts.
After watching the daily press briefings at the White House during my lunch hour, it became pretty obvious to me that most of the reporters where complete useless idiots. When a network like NBC (Nothing But Crap) puts out a story about possibly finding WMD, you gotta believe they are spinning it down and it probably is much more important that it appears. At a minimum, it is probably true.
NBC - the network that calls the Today Show a News program???
Katie and Matt reporters???? Yikes! If Katie Couric is a reporter, I am a jockey!
It is just hard to take ANY news broadcast seriously (even Fox) when they continually interupt a story or interview to make time for a commercial about Feen-a-Mint! They are entertainers, on the same plane as Jay Leno. Without the canned laughter.
I have been watching the news station on cable - New World something?? - it is from England, and it is a news station- that puts to shame anything I ever seen on American TV. I just can't believe people I do not respect or trust. and Matt Lauer don't cut the mustard (I believe, you , old pal!;)

[JustRalph]

Originally posted by andicap
Gee Ralph, I have such mixed feelings here. I love your avatar -- (can we start a petition to get TV Land to put Hogan's Heroes back on?) --but your politics,..oh well. we'll just agree to disagree and leave it that. (

Ok Andi .....I just realized that if I ever change my avatar again (of course I do it about once a week) in the message above, no matter when it is read,,,,,,, I will be saying " the current avatar is pretty close" Hmm.....going to have to start watching what I post as an Avatar.

On the subject of politics......I won't argue with you because I have read your posts for a while and you usually put forth a cogent opinion when you dabble in our political discussions, unlike a few others who just scream it at you. You are a real writer too. That holds some water with me. If you get paid to write, you have accomplished something. So we can disagree on a different level than some others here. But lately these off topic political discussions are starting to take the fun out of the racing stuff. There is another big race in a few days and we can get back to screaming at each other about the Preakness and who did what to win etc. It will be the anniversary of my Biggest score to date and that is a reason to either celebrate or be mad because I don't have a new high yet.............:cool:

[andicap]

But Ralph, what's YOUR favorite Hogan's Heroes episode?

:D

[JustRalph]

How about the one where Schultz replaces Col. Klink. Busted me up. But any episode that concentrated on Schultz was great.

The way he acted around the women and Lebeau's cooking was masterful. :D :cool:

One of my favorite Hoganesque moments was on the Simpsons when Homer had a hallucination and it was one of the founding fathers. Homer didn't recognize him so the apparition had to change into a historical figure that Homer could recognize and Identify with. So he changes into Col. Klink and the first thing Homer asks him is

" Did you know that Hogan has tunnels built all over your camp?"

Col. Klink a true authentic historical character...........

[Derek2U]

Cause i like U a lot i read ur past 255 posts & I see U become more & more conservative as U type. Is this the BoxCar push?
anyways I wish U would think more b4 u type but mabye its
easier 2 win the Mega lottery. hehe DJC

[superfecta]

Heard a guy say what about Saddam being a WMD?And it made some sense.If the guy is dangerous to the rest of the free world by his actions,he is no different than Hitler was in his time.Different delivery system but same results can be made.Hitler wasn't stopped until he started to invade other countries,Saddam was stopped before he left his borders.But can anyone say this guy wasn't dangerous?

[KevinBM]

I have just heard on a news channel that an Iraqi school teacher has been arrested, they searched his home and found him to be in posession of a calculator, a set square, an abacus and a protractor.

President bush was heard to say that this is clear and irrefutable evidence of Iraq having weapons of maths instruction :D :D

[Dave Schwartz]

Kevin,

Ba-da-bump.

Well, I can tell you this... If you are going to tell jokes around here they are going to have to improve. This is a tough room. <G>

Dave