Blix found a "smoking gun" in Iraq?

[Drake Tungsten]

Originally posted by Orange
When they use their weapons, then we'll talk.

http://usinfo.state.gov/products/pubs/iraq/warning.htm

Let's talk...

[Urban Ranger]

Originally posted by Drake Tungsten
All the usual suspects were pretty quick to dismiss this. The US/UK must be on to something...

Amusing. A backbencher to a backbencher making vague noises.

[Urban Ranger]

Originally posted by Oerdin
This is not rocket science and even dullards like Urban Ranger can figure this simple fact out.

Snooze.

You have yet to show that you are smarter than Blix and his lads - why is this drone a "delivery system?" What do you know that Blix doesn't?

Launching childish personal attacks against other posters only make you look bad.

[Dinner]

Here is the reality which all the leftist appalogists in the world cannot erase:

You have to understand something here that's so diabolically clever. The Iraqis knew that gas is heavier than air and would penetrate cellars and basements more effectively by launching a conventional artillery attack on the town for several hours. In other words, they knew that people would do what they always did during an artillery barrage and run to their basements. They were stuck in their basements, and then [the Iraqis] launched the chemical weapons attack…turning them, really, into gas chambers.

They know this is true but they still spend all of their time defending Saddam because in their sick twisted minds the U.S. is some how worse the Saddam. They are a pathetic joke...

[Drake Tungsten]

What childish personal attacks? I thought "dullard" was a quite diplomatic way of describing you...

[Dinner]

Me too...

[Ted Striker]

Easy with the name calling fellas...

[Ted Striker]

Though I guess I'm not one to talk since I've done it in other threads.

[Urban Ranger]

None of the chicken hawks can proof that the aforementioned drone is a real delivery system.

Case closed.


Drake,

Thanks for proving my point.


By the way, would any of you have the balls to respond to the IAEA report as quoted in this thread?

[korn469]

Its not BS at all. At the end of the Gulf War, we kicked his ass. He signed a peace agreement and agreed to disarm all his weapons of mass destruction. It was in the terms of his 'surrender' (IIRC). We dictated this, because we kicked HIS ass, and could dictate what ever the hell we wanted. He could have exiled himself, adn leave power, or he could live in power under our terms. He decided to live under our terms, but he is not. That is (one of the reasons) why we are going to oust the son of a ***** once in for all.

we're doing it because it's easy, i'm not saying my friends in the military are going to an ice cream social in kuwait or anything, but iraq shouldn't be any harder than afganistan, i also agree that saddam is a despotic ruler who is a threat to his people and the people of those around him, but simply because we have more military might doesn't make it just for us to say "we can have nukes saddam but we can't" and that is why it is bs to me

[Kramerman]

anybody know any alternative purpose for these drones other than for delivering chemical agents? What else could there purpose be in other words, my imagination is at a loss and i havent really read much on this discovery.

[DanS]

While this issue might be a snoozer (or not), it does bring up the point that Blix's public summary and his report didn't match in tone. That's the real problem here.

[Drake Tungsten]

By the way, would any of you have the balls to respond to the IAEA report as quoted in this thread?

Gladly.

The IAEA performance in Iraq has not been reassuring.  Iraq learned early on that it could conceal a nuclear weapons program by cooperating with the IAEA. Khidhir Hamza, a senior Iraqi scientist who defected to the United States in 1994, wrote in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists that Saddam Hussein approved a deception-by-cooperation scheme in 1974. "Iraq was careful to avoid raising IAEA suspicions; an elaborate strategy was gradually developed to deceive and manipulate the agency," Hamza said.[6]  The strategy worked. Iraq, as a signer of the 1968 Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, was subject to IAEA inspections on all nuclear facilities. But IAEA's inspectors had failed to detect the Iraqi "Manhattan Project," which was discovered after the Gulf War by IAEA teams at sites identified by the U.N. Special Commission on Iraq (UNSCOM).

The IAEA's track record of missing evidence of Iraq's nuclear weapons program both predates and post-dates the Gulf War. In 1981, Israeli air strikes destroyed Iraq's nearly complete Osirak research reactor because Tel Aviv feared Iraq's plutonium-production capacity if the plant was allowed to start up. After the attack, IAEA inspector Roger Richter resigned from the agency to defend Israel's action. He had helped negotiate the IAEA's "safeguards" arrangement for the reactor and later told Congress that the agency had failed to win sufficient access to detect plutonium production for weapons.[7]  In August 1990, only weeks after Iraq invaded Kuwait, IAEA safeguards director Jon Jennekens praised Iraqi cooperation with the IAEA as "exemplary," and said Iraq's nuclear experts "have made every effort to demonstrate that Iraq is a solid citizen" under the nonproliferation treaty.[8]

Its turf battle won, the IAEA continued to see things Iraq's way. In September 1992, after destruction of the nuclear-weapons plants found in the war's aftermath, Mauricio Zifferero, head of the IAEA's "Action Team" in Iraq, declared Iraq's nuclear program to be "at zero now. . . totallydormant."  Zifferero explained that the Iraqis "have stated many times to us that they have decided at the higher political levels to stop these activities. This we have verified."[9]

But it eventually became clear that Iraq had concealed evidence of its continuing nuclear bomb program. In 1995, Saddam Hussein's son-in-law, Gen. Hussein Kamel, fled to Jordan and revealed that he had led a "crash program" just before the Gulf War to build a crude nuclear weapon out of IAEA-safeguarded, civilian nuclear fuel, as well as a program after the war to refine the design of nuclear warheads to fit Scud missiles. Iraqi officials insisted that Kamel's work was unauthorized, and they led IAEA officials to a large cache of documents at Kamel's farm that, the Iraqis said, proved Kamel had directed the projects without their knowledge.

The Kamel revelations refuted an IAEA claim, made in 1993 by Hans Blix, then Director General of the IAEA and currently head of the United Nations Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission (UNMOVIC), that "the Iraqis never touched the nuclear highly enriched uranium which was under our safeguards."[10]  In fact, the Iraqis had cut the ends off of some HEU fuel rods, and were preparing to remove the material from French- and Russian-supplied research reactors for use in weapons when the allied bombing campaign interrupted the project.[11] The IAEA accepted a technically flawed claim by Iraqi officials that the bomb project would have been delayed by the need to further enrich the bomb-grade fuel for use in weapons.[12]  Also, defector Hamza later made clear that Iraq could have made direct use of the material in a bomb within a few months.

http://www.nci.org/new/iraq-ib.htm

[Kramerman]

Originally posted by korn469


we're doing it because it's easy, i'm not saying my friends in the military are going to an ice cream social in kuwait or anything, but iraq shouldn't be any harder than afganistan, i also agree that saddam is a despotic ruler who is a threat to his people and the people of those around him, but simply because we have more military might doesn't make it just for us to say "we can have nukes saddam but we can't" and that is why it is bs to me

well then, if he didnt want to rule iraq under those terms, he should have left power. but he agreed to those terms, and has broken that agreement. Now he must suffer the consequences. If we destroy an enemy, we have the right to dictate whatever terms we wish. That is why one doesnt wanna lose a war. That is why it is dangerous to go to war. Saddam shoulda thought twice before invading Kuwait, if he wanted to be in power, and develope WoMD.

kman

[Ted Striker]

Originally posted by Kramerman
anybody know any alternative purpose for these drones other than for delivering chemical agents? What else could there purpose be in other words, my imagination is at a loss and i havent really read much on this discovery.

They can be rigged up to be extremely effective at producing a decoy radar signiture. (Tricks ground radar into thinking they are actually fighters), or they can be used as surveillance. But I doubt that's what's going on here. (Since these are designed specifically for delivering chemicals).