Presidential poll

So we did not find WMDs that does not mean that he did not have them. Read this. something for you to realize why he was a threat.

by Robert Kagan & William Kristol

“When I left office, there was a substantial amount of biological and chemical material unaccounted for. That is, at the end of the first Gulf War, we knew what he had. We knew what was destroyed in all the inspection processes and that was a lot. And then we bombed with the British for four days in 1998. We might have gotten it all; we might have gotten half of it; we might have gotten none of it. But we didn’t know. So I thought it was prudent for the president to go to the U.N. and for the U.N. to say you got to let these inspectors in, and this time if you don’t cooperate the penalty could be regime change, not just continued sanctions.”
–Bill Clinton, July 22, 2003

FORMER PRESIDENT CLINTON is right about what he and the whole world knew about Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction programs. And most of what everyone knew about Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction had nothing to do with this or any other government’s intelligence collection and analysis. Had there never been a Central Intelligence Agency–an idea we admit sounds more attractive all the time–the case for war against Iraq would have been rock solid. Almost everything we knew about Saddam’s weapons programs and stockpiles, we knew because the Iraqis themselves admitted it.

Here’s a little history that seems to have been completely forgotten in the frenzy of the past few months. Shortly after the first Gulf War in 1991, U.N. inspectors

discovered the existence of a surprisingly advanced Iraqi nuclear weapons program. In addition, by Iraq’s own admission and U.N. inspection efforts, Saddam’s regime possessed thousands of chemical weapons and tons of chemical weapon agents. Were it not for the 1995 defection of senior Iraqi officials, the U.N. would never have made the further discovery that Iraq had manufactured and equipped weapons with the deadly chemical nerve agent VX and had an extensive biological warfare program.

Here is what was known by 1998 based on Iraq’s own admissions:

  • years prior to gulf war. Iraq produced at least 3.9 tons of VX, a deadly nerve gas, and acquired 805 tons of precursor ingredients for the production of more VX.

  • That Iraq had produced or imported some 4,000 tons of ingredients to produce other types of poison gas.

  • That Iraq had produced 8,500 liters of anthrax.

  • That Iraq had produced 500 bombs fitted with parachutes for the purpose of delivering poison gas or germ payloads.

  • That Iraq had produced 550 artillery shells filled with mustard gas.

  • That Iraq had produced or imported 107,500 casings for chemical weapons.

  • That Iraq had produced at least 157 aerial bombs filled with germ agents.

  • That Iraq had produced 25 missile warheads containing germ agents (anthrax, aflatoxin, and botulinum).

Again, this list of weapons of mass destruction is not what the Iraqi government was suspected of producing. (That would be a longer list, including an Iraqi nuclear program that the German intelligence service had concluded in 2001 might produce a bomb within three years.) It was what the Iraqis admitted producing. And it is this list of weapons–not any CIA analysis under either the Clinton or Bush administrations–that has been at the heart of the Iraq crisis.

that is some infromation from the weekly standered.

So lets say that Saddam did have nuclear weapons, and lets say he used one on the US. you would be calling Bush an idiot for not doing anything. you would be saying he had all the intelligence telling him do something and he still did not do anything. think about it. Saddam hates the US. He had plots to kill the first Bush. Saddam is a monster. A MONSTER that tested his own chemical weapons on his own people. you believe this guy was not a threat? UNBELIEVABLE.

Let’s just say that Saddam wasn’t an “immediate” threat to the US.

It’s funny how the CIA is so useless when they come out with reports saying that Iraq had no WMD and was actually heading backwards in their weapons. (It was worded along those lines.)
I liked it when the CIA had all this information about some guys that were planning this big attack on the US and the Bush admin felt it wasn’t a big deal. I guess they can pick and chose which ones are a real threat and which ones were not.

Saddam was a goof and he needed to go. This whole thing about him gassing his own people was when the guys from the North (Kurds?) attacked the capital just after the Gulf war because they were promised to be backed by the US but weren’t so I guess in defence Saddam started up his big internal combustion engine and sprayed his people with the exhaust pipe.

Also a lot of those weapons you see in the photos on the news from the past week, were impounded and already accounted for by the UN.

There was no reason to RUSH to war but Saddam needed to be gone. Bush shouldn’t have lied to the American people about all this so called stuff Saddam had and was gonna use them against the US if they didn’t hurry up and get there. As far as Hans Blix and his UN buddies go, they had been doing weapons inspections for years on and off and didn’t find anything new and guess what, in the end there wasn’t anything new.

Just keep the people scared and they’ll believe you. How many americans are gonna hop on a plane and go look for themselves? Ok, maybe Sean Penn but other than him nobody. They’re gonna listen to their “Leader”

My friends father told me (very high in the ranks) that those that read or talk about things they are not involved with only speculate. While I have no clue if WMD were present or not, I do know that finding parts or pieces would only give ideas and hope to those that wish to actuctually use them. Showing evidence of failure or possible actions is just as risky. I do know that the government wants to protect us from the truth so that we don’t have Y2K freaks instead of starbucks and SUV consumers. The economy is inportant and fear doesn’t help. Let us review facts and general information before we get into waters we don’t know about.

[QUOTE=NV]So we did not find WMDs that does not mean that he did not have them.

Of interest is why Saddam was between a rock and a hard place on the WMD issue. If he had complied with the US demands he would not only have to get rid of any remaining WMD (if there were any), he’d have to say so publicly, leaving him in an extremely vulnerable position with his own army and with Iran and possibly others. He had to maintain at least the illusion of credible deterance to his enemies while playing a cat-and-mouse compliance game with the US. Later, when the US forces questioned captured Iraqi units, each one said (and, we assume, believed): “We don’t have any WMD but the unit up the road does” (None of the units would have fought if they recognized they had no aces up their sleeves).
As for “precursor agents”. hopefully that won’t be the gold standard for US military attack on Canada. We have thousands of tons of Chlorine for water treatment, swimming pools etc, but it’s a precursor agent for poison gas.
Much has been made of intelligence failures, but I don’t believe for one second that the US didn’t know the true state of the Iraqi WMDs, otherwise they never would have considered an invasion with such meagre forces.
Much was made of Saddam’s use of Chemical weapons on the Kurds some years back, but few seem to remember that both Cheney and Rumsfeld were in Bagdad within a week of this outrage sucking up to Saddam trying to sell a multi billion dollar pipeline contract for their companies, Halliburton and Bechtel respectively. Saddam turned the project down as the pipeline would have been vulnerable to Isreali attack. If Saddam had taken the deal, the history of the whole area would have been different.

Interesting article, I have no opinion on it either way, but interested to hear what some of you up north think. Maybe the US is invading Canada, but not in the normal sense of the word!

Unhappy Democrats Must Wait to Get Into Canada:
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=1896&e=1&u=/nm/election_canada_haven_dc

There’s another story claiming Saddam actually believed he had WMDs when in fact he didn’t. During UNSCOMBs inspections in the late 90s, his generals bounced the weapons from site to site hoping to escape detection. When Saddam booted the inspectors out, and with an American attack looming, his generals, sensing they were about to get pounded by the US, sold the weapons off on their own. When Saddam asked if the weapons were ready, his underlings all smiled and nodded.

The US must have known something Saddam didn’t. Hard to believe they would launch such a paddy-cake attack against a well-armed Saddam. IOW, he had no weapons.

Saddam would not have risked using chemical or biological weapons against the US invasion. Think about it. You have a divided world over the issue, why unite them by using them against the invasion force when their impact on a battle field outcome is going to be minimal?

Saddam used chemical weapons on us in the first Gulf war.

No he didn’t. Show me one piece of reliable evidence that suggests he did. Even Patrick Eddington who left his position as a CIA analyst in order to expose the CIA cover up of US troops exposure to chemical weapons states that the troops came in contact with them during the Khamisiyah weapons pit destruction in 1991 - as to current pentagon reports.

You don’t think it’s strange that Rumsfeld didn’t use Saddam using chemical weapons on US troops durining the first gulf war as a major part of his pre-war propaganda, when he went on ad nauseumn about them being used against the Kurds and Iran?

cns.miis.edu/pubs/npr/vol04/43/tucker43.pdf

or just type in search for" chemical weapons used in the Gulf war

http://www.miniclip.com

It would be highly unlikely that some chemical weapons were NOT used, especially in Gulf War 1, when there were so many more of them, even if simply by confusion and accident, including the US detonation of Iraqi storage dumps.
In one recent incident, the US forces found a Mustard Gas shell, that insurgents had intended to use for a roadside mine. The insurgents didn’t know the difference and had carted off a gas shell, mistaking it for high explosives. The US concluded that it was accidental as the insurgents would hardly want to gas themselves and their families in their own homes.
As for Gulf War syndrome, there were probably many versions of it, but from the Canadian experience, there was a link to the use of Depleted Uranium both in ammunition and armour. Our lying Brass claimed exposure of our troops to radiation was BELOW normal for the general population (WOW), but one severely affected quartermaster willed that his body be autopsied. At death, his bones were found to have stored hundreds of times the radiation the military had claimed.

Valid points Charlie…

As for talk with people in the know about the CIA I laugh hard at their lack of understanding when they are not first hand observers. They must be reading the Bourne series too much… :stuck_out_tongue:

I wonder if the SEAL relay over in N.Korea will be public soon? No bodies no evidence.

Lets not play what if games the point is, Saddam is not Bin Laden and you do not give a damn about the well-being of the Iraqi people, there are no weapons not even those confounded useless scuds. His armies gased Iranians (breach of the Geneva conventions) during the early eighties the US administration did not give a damn and you (the American people) were ignorant to this fact so he did not test his weapons on his own people first.

Alot of atrocities are being perpatrated by governments around the world. What is different about General Augusto Pinochet and S Hussain? Yet we did not see Ford, Carter or Reagan sending in troops to Chile. The US only saw him as a threat when it suited its purpose, you are so brain washed its unbelieveable. Remeber Hans Blix declared that WMDs were not present the war was waged on this particular point NOT because he was DIRECTLY implicated in 9/11. So the war was unjustified and unnecessary.

WHO SOLD HIM THE RAW MATERIALS? WHO PUT HIM IN POWER? YOU DID NOT REALISE HE WAS A THREAT UNTIL NOW?

Through out 20th century history countless US administration have made a f**** up of foreign policy, from zionism to Indonesia, Cambodia, Vietnam, Ghana, Nicaragua, Japan, North Korea, Taiwan the list is endless you interfered all for corporate gain and raw material exploitation. Now Iraq. You throw your power around without compassion without an even hand.

There is a lot of politics between Iraq and the US that doesn’t seem to get brought up all that often. It’s nice to read some posts from people whose memories go back farther than 9/11.

In the UK Gulf War syndrome, has affected hundreds of ex service men. The government has acknowledged it exists but not had the courage to come totally clean.

The cost of compensating those affected would be quite considerable. It’s much easier for the government to sweep it under the carpet and hope the victims give up pursuing the issue.

“UK troops were exposed to sarin and this, along with the multiple vaccinations troops were given and exposure to depleted uranium, has caused the illnesses”
Shaun Rusling, of the National Gulf Veterans and Families Association

Most of the reports I heard were that the vaccinations were the reason for the Gulf War Syndrome.

I think that certainly played a large part in it and is perhaps the most worrying aspect.

In the first link I provided it describes how the troops and their tents were also sprayed with insecticide to ward off sand flies and other pests. I may not be a neuro scientist, but thats sounds like absolute lunacy.

"Soldiers’ tents were sprayed with locally bought insecticides to ward off disease-carrying sandflies and mosquitoes, and Walker testified that some soldiers were even sprayed directly.

Like most troops, Walker also took pyridostigmine, a drug meant to block effects of nerve gas but which can also cause some of the same effects. And evidence is mounting that at Al Jubayl or elsewhere in the battle zone he could have been exposed to sarin."

Well said. “In all, it is estimated that 95-98% of the indigenious population of the Americas died as a consequence of European contact.”(Robbins H. Richard, 2002) 100 million Africans were killed during the middle passage and 400 years of slavery. Yet the U.S. goverment has never been held accountable. The legacy of the U.S. government has been in keeping the majority of its citizens ignorant. The greatest hypocrite of all.