Spectator: Another Ignored Discovery (still clinging to WMD)

[Barrett808]

Another Ignored Discovery
By Steven Martinovich
Published 6/16/2004 12:05:28 AM

With the media's focus on chronicling every attack on coalition forces or terrorist attack against Iraqi civilians in Iraq, they might be forgiven for missing other stories occasionally. Reporting democracy at the local level or the opening of a new school isn't sexy work for the most part. It's the equivalent of traveling halfway across the world to cover stories that local beat reporters write every day in your local paper. That focus on Iraqi insurgents, however, seems to have blinded almost everyone to a major story that surfaced last week since it was largely ignored by the media with the exception of the World Tribune and some smaller newspapers.

On June 9, Demetrius Perricos announced that before, during and after the war in Iraq, Saddam Hussein shipped weapons of mass destruction and medium-range ballistic missiles to countries in Europe and the Middle East. Entire factories were dismantled and shipped as scrap metal to Jordan, the Netherlands and Turkey, among others, at the rate of about 1,000 tons of metal a month. As an example of speed by which these facilities were dismantled, Perricos displayed two photographs of a ballistic missile site near Baghdad, one taken in May 2003 with an active facility, the other in February 2004 that showed it had simply disappeared.

What passed for scrap metal and has since been discovered as otherwise is amazing. Inspectors have found Iraqi SA-2 surface-to-air missiles in Rotterdam -- complete with U.N. inspection tags -- and 20 SA-2 engines in Jordan, along with components for solid-fuel for missiles. Short-range Al Samoud surface-to-surface missiles were shipped abroad by agents of the regime. That missing ballistic missile site contained missile components, a reactor vessel and fermenters -- the latter used for the production of chemical and biological warheads.

"The problem for us is that we don't know what may have passed through these yards and other yards elsewhere," Ewen Buchanan, Perricos's spokesman, said. "We can't really assess the significance and don't know the full extent of activity that could be going on there or with others of Iraq's neighbors."

Perricos isn't an American shill defending the Bush administration, but rather the acting executive chairman of the U.N. Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission (UNMOVIC) and his report was made to the Security Council. Yet his report didn't seem to be of much interest to a media which has used the lack of significant discoveries to question the rationale for the war. After over a year of searching, experts have managed to find little in the way of the biological and chemical weapons that every major intelligence service -- including those of Germany and France -- maintained existed. We still haven't, but Perricos' report brings us one step closer.

(more)

http://www.spectator.org/dsp_article.asp?art_id=6705

[papau]

1. Short-range Al Samoud surface-to-surface missiles were "legal" -not WMD

Or does the Spectator not understand that.

[Wickerman]

2. oh, and BushCo* just happens to be ignoring this HUGE smoking gun?

nope, just another load of shit from a highly partisan source.

[mhr]

3. So What's The Point - The Point For The American People Is That

there were not stockpiles of nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons that were claimed to exist.

No one doubts that any leader has clandestine activities going on at any particular time. The question is the nature and extent of those activities.

Seems pretty clear that Saddam was fairly well proscribed.

[Mountainman]

4. If you were ordered to destroy your weapons and you did, then you would

have scrap metal. Looks to me like Saddam was doing what the UN told him to do.
And if you sold the scrap metal to persons in other countries you would ship it there wouldn't you? And if those scrapped weapons had inspection tags on them when whole they may have the tags on them when they were cut to pieces right?


Are they saying that we are justified in going to war because Saddam turned his weapons into scrap metal and sold the scrap metal on the open market?

Didn't Bush demand that Saddam disarm? Didn't the UN inspectors say that Saddam was in the process of disarming when they were pulled out of Iraq by Bush?

[jonnyo]

5. There's a lot of problems with what is being inferred by that article.

This news hasn't even been ignored. I've read several in-depth examinations of it over the last few months. None of them have come even close to coming up with anything concrete or even speculative enough to qualify for justifying a global war. It's just more fear mongering.

The missiles listed specifically in the article have already been speced out to be inside the qualifications of what was being allowed by the UN. There is no international law covering the selling of junk metal. Selling of these types of ballistic armaments is rarely, if ever, legislated by international treaties and rarely enforced when it is. The weapons listed do not even fall into the ridiculously invented category of so-called WMD without warheads. The Chem and Bio, even if it is found, could have just as easily been sold to holding parties by the United States -- if it came from Iraq, that would put it a decade beyond its expiration date.... and on and on and on...

The Bush administration has done nothing to interfere with arms proliferation world wide -- NOTHING. They want global war so they can force their way into permanent power.

[struggle4progress]

6. Boy, the wingnuts are good at deliberately garbling stories.

The "two photographs ... one taken in May 2003 ... the other in February 2004" obviously show what happened while the US was in charge. So the alleged shipment "abroad by agents of the regime" occurred under the nose of the occupation authority.

So the real question is: why was the coalition dismantling as much as possible, as quickly as possible?