Does anyone know what the definition for WMD is? I do. Dictionary.com defines it as follows:
noun
a weapon that kills or injures civilian as well as military personnel (nuclear and chemical and biological weapons) [syn: weapon of mass destruction]
So why is it people think that because there have not been any Nuclear weapons found yet that they never existed in the first place. Do the many caches of nerve agent found not count as WMDs? Do people not realize that the most popular nerve agent, Sarin(GB), is lethal at 75-100 mg if inhaled. Or that if it comes in contact with skin it is lethal at 1000-1700 mg. 10 mg is little more than a grain of rice. How much rice will fit into a 50 gallon barrel? To make it easier here's the math; 50 gallons = 189.25 liters=189250000 mg. Now think about how many doses of GB that makes. It makes 111,323 doses of contact agent and 473,125 doses of inhaled agent. That is just one barrel. Now multiply that by one cache that can equal five or more barrels. Some caches have been as many as 1000 barrels. From my husbands personal experience over 20 caches were found in just the year he was there by his Division.
After doing the math can anyone honestly say that no WMDs were found?
4 comments:
Yes, I agree with you that nerve agent can be classified as a WMD. However, how many people in the general population do you know that can recite the definition for WMDs off the tops of their heads? Probably not very many. Do you think that everyone knows that WMD aren't just limited to nuclear weapons? I don't. Many people most likely think that no WMDs have been found because they don't know the full definition. Personally I think that it's the Presidential Administration's responsibility that the public know all the factual information about WMDs so as to avoid confusion on the subject.
>Do the many caches of nerve agent found not count as WMDs?
Depends on what you mean by "count." If you mean these caches are evidence of the rationale for the war, then clearly, they don't count. These weapons were all from the time period of the first Gulf War and the vast majority of them were not operational. The American people didn't support the war because there were a bunch of old, moldy mostly unusable WMDs laying around. We supported the war on the premise that Iraq had an active program creating new WMDs that would be used against us and/or our allies.
>After doing the math can anyone honestly say that no WMDs were found?
This isn't the real question. Again, we didn't go to war over the existence of old WMDs, we went to war over a current, operational WMD program, which did not exist.
http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0606/21/sitroom.03.html
"ENSOR: But the ranking Democrat on House intelligence, Jane Harman, said, quote, "there's nothing new here." And Charles Delfor (ph), the CIA's weapons inspector tells us the weapons are all pre- Gulf War vintage shells, no longer effective weapons. Not evidence, he says, of an ongoing WMD program under Saddam Hussein -- Wolf."
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/06/21/AR2006062101837.html
"The U.S. military announced in 2004 in Iraq that several crates of the old shells had been uncovered and that they contained a blister agent that was no longer active. Neither the military nor the White House nor the CIA considered the shells to be evidence of what was alleged by the Bush administration to be a current Iraqi program to make chemical, biological and nuclear weapons."
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A14897-2004Oct7?language=printer
"BUSH: The chief weapons inspector, Charles Duelfer, has now issued a comprehensive report that confirms the earlier conclusion of David Kay that Iraq did not have the weapons that our intelligence believed were there."
One senior Defense Department official told Fox News the chemical weapons were not in useable conditions.
http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=50746
"This does not reflect a capacity that was built up after 1991," the official said, adding the munitions "are not the WMDs this country and the rest of the world believed Iraq had, and not the WMDs for which this country went to war."
Quoting your own article,....http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=50746
Also appearing on Fox News was former U.N. weapons inspector Tim Trevan, who said some of the weapons could still have posed a danger, even in a deteriorated state.
"Sarin could be a danger," he said. "The mustard, the problem is when it sits in the munition for a very long time in these high temperatures, it polymerizes. It goes from a liquid to a gooey mass."
"Probably more important is why has the administration not made this public beforehand," retired Air Force Lt. Gen. Tom McInerny said of the report. "I think the fact is that the Russians moved large stocks [of WMDs] out in the fall of 2002. ... They went into three locations into Syria, in one location in the Bekaa Valley. If you get in there and if you found those weapons and found the precursors, the fingerprints would go back to Russia, China and France. Now those are the three countries that had the most conventional weapons sales to Saddam Hussein. ... I believe they were complicit. So I don't think the administration wants to trash three of the five members of the [U.N.] Security Council."
Does it matter whether it is old or new? Dead is still dead. One of the reasons given was because Hussein refused to get rid of his chemical weapons. Hussein lied and said there wasn't any to be found. He also buried fighter jets in the sand. Who's to say that the weapons we have been looking for are not buried as well. They are much smaller than the jets and the dessert if very large. Without specific coordinates it would be a needle in a hay stack to find.
>Does it matter whether it is old or new?
Yes it does. As all of the articles listed make it clear that the older these things get, the less likely they are to be dangerous. "Could" is a far stretch from "is."
And it is quite clear that these aren't the weapons we went to war over. This type of stuff we knew about and the quantities and quality of these weapons would not have convinced the American people or most of our allies that war was necessary, since most countries in the world have more dangerous weapons than this stuff.
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